ULAWAYO, Zimbabwe — Last March, Debbie Siyangapi took the pulpit in an Anglican church here in Zimbabwe's second-largest city and confessed her darkest secret to several hundred worshipers. Within an hour, she had donned a nun's habit as a disguise and slipped out of the church through a side entrance, literally fleeing for her safety, said Ms. Siyangapi and human rights groups that are now sheltering her.

For Ms. Siyangapi's secret was not merely her own. Her appearance was also testimony to one of the least documented — and most brutal — practices of the military enforcers of Zimbabwe's authoritarian government, enforcers from whom she now has to hide. Ms. Siyangapi told listeners that month that she had been abducted from a Bulawayo street market in November 2001 and forcibly enrolled in the National Youth Service, a ragtag, government-run paramilitary group formed three years ago by the government to stifle growing political dissent among Zimbabwe's civilians.

Her duties, however, were not political: during her nine-month stay in a training camp and later at a paramilitary base, she said, she was raped almost nightly, sometimes several times a night, by some of the hundreds of young male conscripts there.

To the extent she had proof, she offered it to the crowd: a 6-month-old baby girl named Nocthula, or Peace.

"At night, they removed the globes from the light sockets," Ms. Siyangapi, 22, said in an interview at a hide-out in South Africa, to which she fled after escaping Bulawayo in July. "Sometimes there were 10 boys. They didn't leave until 3 a.m. If you cried, you were beaten."

Ms. Siyangapi is one of the few women to speak publicly about the prevalence of rape and other sexual atrocities in the Zimbabwe military. But a growing number of human rights groups have charged in recent months that forced sex and sexual torture are routine elements of life for men and women alike in the Youth Service, used as both a reward and a punishment.

In a report issued in September, the Solidarity Peace Trust, a faith-based group of southern African human rights activists, accused the youth paramilitary group of sanctioning "the rape, and multiple rape, of young girls by boys undergoing training with them and by their military instructors."

"The resulting pregnancies and infections with sexually transmitted diseases, including H.I.V., not only devastate the lives of the youth concerned but are creating a terrible legacy for the nation," the report stated.

Amnesty International documented cases of rape within the Youth Service in a report released in April. The Amani Trust, perhaps the most active human rights group currently in Zimbabwe, has estimated that as many as 1,000 women are being held in Youth Service camps as sexual servants. The trust, an affiliate of the International Council for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture, assists victims of political violence.

Anthony P. Reeler, a former director of the trust who has been barred from entering Zimbabwe by the government, said it was difficult to say how prevalent rape was within Zimbabwe's military and paramilitary because so few instances were reported.

"What's happening in the camps I would call forced concubinage," Mr. Reeler, now a human rights activist in South Africa, said in a recent telephone interview. "It's much more in line with the `comfort women' of the Japanese and Philippine armed forces" of World War II.

Still, the Amani Trust reported a rising incidence of sexual assault on political opponents of Zimbabwe's government before disputed elections in March 2002, which granted a new term to Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president since 1980.

Mr. Reeler and others say politically driven assaults, opportunistic rape and the sort of forced servitude experienced by women like Ms. Siyangapi continue unabated.

In Bulawayo, Jenny Williams, the leader of the feminist organization Women of Zimbabwe Arise, said in a recent interview that the ranks of women within the youth militia were only increasing, a function of Zimbabwe's collapsing economy and social structure.