YAOUNDE (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - During a dreary Sunday morning church service, 14-year-old Viviane - tired of wrestling with her sexual attraction to girls - resigned herself to an unhappy conclusion: she was bewitched.

At school and at church in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, she had long been told that liking someone of the same sex was not only a sin, but could also be a sign that a sinister spell had been cast on you.

“I didn’t see girls like everyone else - I thought it was a bad spirit that had invaded me,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation with a rueful laugh by phone from France, where she sought asylum last year with her girlfriend’s help.

“So I started praying to make it go away.”

But her prayers failed. Four years later, Viviane was chained to the wall and violently raped by a man who her family forced her to marry after discovering that she was a lesbian.

From South Africa to India and Ecuador, gay people are subjected to ‘corrective rape’ by their families, strangers and vigilantes who believe that homosexuality is a mental illness that needs to be ‘cured’.

Sometimes it is done under the cover of darkness or when the pounding of rain on tin roofs muffles the screams, gay Cameroonians told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Other times, it is arranged by family members who regularly take the law into their own hands, torturing, raping and murdering gay and lesbian relatives that they are convinced are witches or have been cursed. Read more via Thompson Reuters