by Hala Alkarib
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.
“Numerous survivors who suffered violence from the RSF also faced blame and shame from their communities.”
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.
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Read the full article in The Guardian, published 2 June 2026.