Sudan’s women hit by severe sexual violence, minister says

Women are paying the highest price in Sudan’s brutal war, as sexual violence is increasingly used as a weapon to terrorise communities and fracture society, according to Africa News via AFP on January 25th.

Women have become the primary victims of abuse in Sudan’s nearly two-year conflict, facing what officials describe as some of the world’s worst cases of conflict-related sexual violence, carried out with near total impunity.

Since April 2023, fighting between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced around 11 million.

The war has also triggered a surge in sexual crimes, with survivors reporting rape during home raids, looting operations, and coordinated attacks on civilian areas.

Social Affairs Minister Sulaima Ishaq al-Khalifa, a long-time women’s rights activist and trained psychologist, says that the abuse affects all age groups. “There is no age limit,” she said. “An 85-year-old woman can be raped. A one-year-old child can be raped.”

According to Khalifa, assaults are often carried out in front of family members as a deliberate tactic of humiliation and psychological terror. Women have also been subjected to sexual slavery, cross-border trafficking, and forced marriages. Sometimes arranged by families attempting to avoid social stigma after the rape.

While violations have been reported on both sides of the conflict, Khalifa said sexual violence is being used “systematically” by the RSF as a weapon of war and a tool of ethnic cleansing.

Her ministry has documented more than 1,800 rape cases between April 2023 and October 2025, excluding large-scale atrocities reported in western Darfur and parts of Kordofan.

“It’s about… humiliating people, forcing them to leave their houses and places and cities. And also breaking… the social fabrics,” Khalifa said. “When you are using sexual violence as a weapon of war, that means you want to extend… the war forever,” because it feeds a “sense of revenge”, she emphasised.

A report by the SIHA Network, an activist group that documents abuse against women in the Horn of Africa, revealed that more than 75 per cent of documented cases involved rape, with 87 per cent attributed to the RSF.

The United Nations has repeatedly warned of targeted attacks on non-Arab communities in Darfur, while the International Criminal Court has opened investigations into war crimes by both sides.

Briefing the UN Security Council in mid-January 2026, ICC deputy prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan said investigators uncovered evidence of an “organised, calculated campaign” in El-Fasher involving mass rapes and executions.

Khalifa said the current wave of abuse is more visible and widespread than during previous Darfur conflicts, with offenders often acting openly and without fear of consequences.

In conservative communities, stigma remains a major obstacle to reporting abuse. Families sometimes force victims into marriage. Including child marriages to conceal rape, particularly when pregnancies result. “We call it a torture operation,” Khalifa said, describing cases involving girls under 18 who are pressured into marriage to hide the crime.

Africa News via AFP, Maghrebi.org