By Hala Alkarib

Article first published in the Guardian 

Since April 2023, Sudan’s women and girls have been subjected to systematic rape and sexual torture. Specialised support and justice for them is key to the country’s recovery and future

In a village in South Darfur, I met a young girl about my daughter’s age – six or seven years old – who touched my hand and said: “I was taken by the Janjaweed.” This was more than 20 years ago, during the first Darfur crisis, and at the time, that was the term women and girls used as we struggled to articulate the scale of violence against civilians, especially sexual violence.

I saw my daughter in that little girl, and I saw myself in her mother. It was my first encounter with conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) in Sudan.

In the years since, I’ve seen how successive regimes and insurgents in Sudan deliberately utilise sexual violence to sustain their grip on power. Perpetrators use it to seize land, force displacement, extract resources, loot communities, silence women and communities, and strip women of their agency. I’ve also seen that it can happen to anyone, depending on their proximity to those in power.

In Darfur and South Kordofan, generations of women have endured repeated waves of CRSV for more than 25 years because of ongoing insurgencies. Since April 2023, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and its allies have carried out one of the most widespread and coordinated assaults in Sudan’s recent history, committing sexual violence and other war crimes against women and communities in Khartoum, Gezira, and the towns and villages of the northern Blue Nile, White Nile and North Kordofan regions – areas that, until then, had not experienced such systematic CRSV in recent history.

I will never forget the schoolteacher who negotiated with seven RSF men to rape her instead of gang-raping her 14-year-old daughter, or the countless families who lost fathers and brothers, shot dead while the women and children in their households were gang-raped. One mother had lost her husband and was fleeing eastern Gezira on foot with her three daughters after they were gang-raped. One of her sons later found a lorry to carry them. On the journey, she mistook the blood coming from her 18-year-old daughter for menstrual bleeding, only to discover that her daughter had cut her vein. The young woman did not survive the journey.

I will also never forget the young bride who threw herself into the Nile or the 21-year-old woman whose family, after her rape became known, took her out of the hospital in shame and then hid her away, where she bled to death. Hundreds of women and children were kept on farms in northern Khartoum and in Omdurman city, and endured months of captivity as sexual slaves, with horrific encounters. The suffering and the torture do not end as the power relations turn; sexual violence against women and girls continues to exist in the Sudan Armed Forces’ territories.

Numerous victims who suffered violence from the RSF while trying to survive also faced blame and shame from their communities, as well as further criminalisation by the police and military intelligence.

In 2025, the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA), the organisation I work for, documented the cases of more than 850 women accused of collaboration with the RSF who were subjected to detention and long-term imprisonment; those women frequently experienced sexual violence during their time in detention.

My organisation, in partnership with grassroots lawyers, spent more than six months securing the release of four women who were held on suspicion of collaboration, without being charged, for more than a year. They say they endured sexual violence and torture while awaiting trial.

Fractured judicial and health systems, marked by limited capacity and inadequate legal, medical and mental health support, leaves hundreds of Sudanese women and children without access to justice or essential care and highly vulnerable to repeated cycles of violence.

To understand the cycles of sexual violence in Sudan, we must examine the legacies of the Sudanese state and how they shape views of women’s bodies, as well as the agency and voice of communities more broadly. CRSV in Sudan is rooted in the state’s violent and discriminatory character, which deepens collective trauma through anger, militarism and retaliation. The persistence of CRSV is further sustained by the unchecked flow of arms into a country that has long neglected demobilisation and security sector reform.

For more than 1,000 days, sexual violence didn’t stop, nor did anyone address it. Although the UK, EU and US have sanctioned a number of actors involved in Sudan’s war, none appear to have been specifically sanctioned or publicly held accountable for their role in perpetrating CRSV. At the same time, inadequate funding and support for women and communities affected by CRSV continues to deepen the crisis. This situation exacerbates the suffering of the survivors and their communities across Sudan and further demoralises Sudanese people as the violence continues.

Healing for survivors and communities is therefore deeply connected, and the fight against sexual violence must become central to the broader struggle for peace, justice and a new vision of sovereignty.

* All information regarding cases is based on SIHA’s database; specific locations are not mentioned to protect survivors’ privacy.

This articles was published by Guardian

Hala Alkarib is the director of the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA). She works with women and communities affected by war, religious militancy and humanitarian crises in Sudan, South Sudan and the Horn of Africa