Sudan’s warring parties, particularly the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), have committed widespread acts of rape, including gang rape, and forced women and girls into marriages in Khartoum, the country’s capital, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Sunday.
The 89-page report, “Khartoum is Not Safe for Women”: Sexual Violence against Women and Girls in Sudan’s Capital,” documents widespread sexual violence, as well as forced and child marriage during the conflict, in Khartoum and its sister cities. Service providers treating and supporting victims also heard reports from women and girls of being held by the RSF in conditions that could amount to sexual slavery.
Men and boys have also been raped, including in detention.
“Despite evidence of the wide-scale occurrence of sexual violence in Khartoum and elsewhere, there has been little meaningful regional or international response,” the report said.
The research also highlights the devastating health and mental health consequences for survivors and the destructive impact of warring parties’ attacks on health care and the Sudanese Armed Forces’ (SAF) willful blocking of aid.
“I have slept with a knife under my pillow for months in fear from the raids that lead to rape by RSF,” a 20-year-old woman living in an area controlled by the RSF told Human Rights Watch in early 2024. “Since this war started, it is not safe anymore to be a woman living in Khartoum under RSF.”
Eighteen of the healthcare workers had provided direct medical care or psychosocial support to survivors of sexual violence or managed individual incidents. They said they had cared for a total of 262 survivors of sexual violence from ages 9 through 60 between the conflict’s onset in April 2023 and February 2024.
HRW urged the African Union and the United Nations to immediately work together to deploy a new mission to protect civilians in Sudan, including preventing sexual and gender-based violence, supporting the delivery of comprehensive services to all survivors, and documenting conflict-related sexual violence. The mission should have a mandate and capacity to monitor the obstruction of and facilitate access to, humanitarian assistance.
