Sudan war’s rape survivors flout taboos to help each other recover

For more than a month after she was tortured and gang-raped by seven Sudanese paramilitary fighters last July, Rania said nothing to anyone. Whenever she even thought about the attack, her body flooded with guilt and shame.

“[I] felt like I was a disgrace to my family and society for allowing myself to be raped and unable to save myself,” says Rania, whose name has been changed for her safety. 

After the brutal assault, she fled Sudan, ending up in a transit camp just across the border in Adré, Chad. There, she met a doctor named Faisal Abdelrahman, who told Rania something that changed her life.

She was not a disgrace or a coward. She was a survivor. And she was not alone. 

Since April 2023, the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group, have been locked in a brutal civil war that has killed at least 15,000 people and forced more than 10 million from their homes. Sudan is now home to 1 in 8 of the world’s uprooted people – the largest displacement crisis on the planet. And the war’s violence has been especially brutal for women, whose bodies have become battlegrounds for both sides. 

“Women are paying the highest price of this war,” says Sulaima Ishaq, an activist who heads the unit of Sudan’s transitional government in charge of combating violence against women and children. A United Nations report released in December described “widespread allegations” of sexual violence in the war. To date, activists have documented nearly 250 cases of rape by armed forces, though they believe these numbers are only a tiny percentage of the true toll. 

But despite the stigma and lack of justice for victims, many Sudanese women have refused to be silenced. 

“I went through the painful experience of rape, and lived through its bitterness knowing that the men who raped me might never get punished,” says Fadia, a volunteer rape counselor who worked with Rania after she arrived in Chad. (Her name has also been changed.) “That alone inspired me to help other rape survivors find healing and get their lives back.” 

Breaking down stigma

Sudan’s civil war broke out a year ago when two rival military leaders who had been jockeying for power after the fall of the country’s longtime dictator, Omar al-Bashir, turned on each other. But the country’s culture of impunity for perpetrators of sexual violence is much older. 

For instance, until 2015, a Sudanese law prohibiting any form of sex outside of marriage meant that people who had been raped could be punished for adultery. In 2014, a woman who had been gang-raped spent a month in jail for “indecent acts” after a video of the attack against her circulated on social media.

Women’s rights activists fought successfully for the law to be reformed, but they say that the atmosphere of impunity, shame, and silence around rape remains. And sexual assaults committed during the civil war have been especially hard to punish, because there are almost no legal remedies at all. 

Since the war began last year, rape has been used as a weapon of war by both the army and the RSF, according the U.N. But the bulk of attacks documented by the U.N. and others have been carried out by the RSF. The paramilitary group has used rape to punish and terrorize communities in the capital, Khartoum, and in its campaigns of ethnic extermination in Darfur, in the west of the country.

As a result, many Sudanese women have chosen to nurse their pain in silence rather than seek help, says Dr. Abdelrahman. 

But in Adré, the survivors he works with are flouting that taboo. For instance, after Rania told of what had happened to her, Dr. Abdelrahman helped put her in touch with other survivors who had organized intensive counseling. Later she began to provide the same service for others.

She now lives in another camp nearby, where she continues to work with those who have been raped. Giving back to her community in this way is one of the reasons she has survived what happened to her, Rania says.

Working with other survivors “helps me find healing because it always feels like I’m also counseling myself,” she says. “[I am] reminding myself that I need to stay strong for the women who rely on me for healing support.” 

“I cannot betray them”

Back in Sudan, Ms. Ishaq, who runs the government unit documenting rape cases, says comprehensive data on sexual crimes committed against Sudanese women during the war is critical to protecting survivors. Accurate figures, she says, also help them get access to the support services they need, like counseling and medical care.

But even this basic work of documentation can be dangerous.

For instance, in December, two women’s rights activists with a feminist organization called Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa were arrested by Sudan’s military intelligence services. There were no formal charges, but the group has been relentlessly recording cases of sexual violence since the war began.

This kind of harassment “is done to intimidate [women] from practicing political work in general ... because Sudanese society has still not accepted the presence of women in public work,” says Fatma Alkhair, a Sudanese feminist and journalist.

Although she works for the government, Ms. Ishaq knows she faces risks as well, particularly because her work with people who have endured sexual violence takes her to displaced persons camps and other locations often caught in the crossfire of the fighting. 

But she says she cannot give up her work for Sudan’s women just because it is dangerous.

“It’s my responsibility to stay here [in Sudan] because I’m the one who can provide formal records and validate facts to protect women and girls,” she says. “Everyone’s asking me to leave, but ... many young girls and women look at me as a role model. I cannot betray them by going to seek safety in another country.”