A U.S. academic has been gang raped in Papua New Guinea by nine armed men who hacked off her blonde hair and left her husband tied naked to a tree

The 32-year-old woman, who was conducting research into exotic birds in a remote forest on Karkar Island, was walking along a bush track with her husband and a guide on Friday when they were set upon by the gang armed with knives and rifles. Her husband and the guide were stripped and bound by the men, who then used a bush knife to hack off the woman's hair before raping her in a terrifying ordeal lasting 20 minutes. The woman chose to speak out about the horrific attack to highlight the violence that women in Papua New Guinea experience. The brutal gang rape came less than a week after an Australian man living in the central highlands of Papua New Guinea was shot dead and his Filipina girlfriend gang raped when a group of men broke into their house. In Papua New Guinea, wives suffer extreme violence in some cases from their husbands over domestic issues, and brutal punishments are handed out to women accused of witchcraft, which is practiced in remote parts of the country. In February 2013, a 20-year-old mother accused of witchcraft was dragged from her village, taken to a rubbish dump, stripped and burned alive near Mount Hagen, in the center of the country. And recently an elderly woman was beheaded with a bush knife after being accused of sorcery.