Children are accusing Egypt's security forces of widespread abuses, including torture and sexual abuse.
Several children testified about incidents of alleged abuse during a press conference Thursday at the Center for Rights in Medicine, according to the Egypt Independent.
A video featuring several of the testimonials was posted to YouTube by Mosireen, a nonprofit media collective "born out of the explosion of citizen journalism and cultural activism in Egypt during the revolution."
Children shared stories of beatings, sexual abuse and emotional torture after being caught up in random group arrests.
A 12-year-old tells how he was "most afraid" in the back of an armored truck, where soldiers threatened to slit his throat.
"In the truck there were five others detained with me. Two of them were sexually assaulted," he says in the video.
The boy claims he wasn't part of any protest but was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"As we were sitting they slapped and kicked me and pulled me by the hair," he adds.
Eventually, he says he told them what they wanted to hear.
Another boy, a 15-year-old, pulls up his shirt to show scars on his back and shoulders. He said they were the results of beatings he endured.
Speaking with the U.K.'s Independent, Mahmoud Bilal, a lawyer who works with detained children, echoed the claim that police appear to be torturing children in their custody.
Bilal said children were electrocuted, while others were hung by the arms in a painful technique popular among "Mubarak-era security services," the news outlet notes.
Another activist, Mohamed el-Maligi, 26, told the Independent that after he was detained in Cairo earlier in February, he personally observed the wounds on 47 children who had also been arrested. One 14-year-old, who had been beaten badly, told el-Maligi "after you leave, we will be finished."
The Egyptian regime has faced accusations of child torture before, notably in November 2012, when Human Rights Watch claimed Egyptian troops arrested more than 300 children during protests in Cairo, allegedly beating and torturing some of them.
The Independent reports that the number of children detained is related to the number of children currently homeless and living on the streets.
According to UNICEF, while hard to pin down an absolute number, "NGOs estimate at least tens of thousands of street children live in Egypt," most of them in Cairo and Alexandria.
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