London, Oct. 9: Women in Zimbabwe are abducting and raping men for ritual purposes, British media reports said on Saturday.
Six men have been gang-raped by women in the last 11 months in this deeply conservative society, the Scotsman reported.
Police said the figure could be much higher as the victims are often too embarrassed to report the crime.
In the most recent case, a 26-year-old policeman from Bulawayo was drugged and raped by three women, the official Chronicle Daily of Zimbabwe reported.
The man was offered a lift in a minibus with three female passengers. When he sat down, one of the passengers suddenly put a cloth saturated with a drug on his nose and he passed out, the paper said.
He regained consciousness only to find that the three women were sexually abusing him. He was eventually abandoned outside the city by the women, minus his mobile phone and $30.
Clues given by the victim are being followed up, said the police spokesman, Mr Bekimpilo Ndlovu.
Similar attacks have been reported in Harare, Gweru and Masvingo, some of them at gunpoint.
In September, two women forced a 44-year-old to have sex with them on a mattress he had just bought in Harare and was trying to transport back home to western Karoi. The pair had offered him a lift to his home, but stopped their vehicle about 80 km into their journey.
Last November, two women locked an 18-year-old youth in Harare’s central Roman Catholic Church and raped him. In most cases the victims are drugged and the women use condoms.
Traditional healers may have instructed the women to collect semen for use in ritual charms, social commentators suggest.
These are people who want to make money because of poverty, Mr Gordon Chavunduka, former head of the Zimbabwe National Association of Traditional Healers told the Zimonline news agency.
“It is very worrying, our society is in trouble, ” he was quoted as saying.