Velated from head to toe, head bowed and no desire to speak. Aisha was waiting for food and soap at the UNHCR distribution point in Kosti, Sudan, when Antonia Vadalà, an operator of the organisation, saw it for the first time. «He had traveled a lot, with his young children in tow. She was crying, it wasn’t easy to talk to her, it wasn’t easy to convince her that she could trust me. She told me that she had seen with her own eyes her husband and grown-up children massacred by armed men. And that she was raped by multiple men in front of her young children. Confused and in pain, she began her escape, without fully understanding what direction she was taking, but certainly without any intention of reporting the sexual violence she suffered. She didn’t want the stigma, the label of a raped woman, to fall on her children’s lives».
It’s just a story: dramatically just one story among the many stories that Antonia hears every day in Sudan.
Sudan after three years of war: “an abandoned crisis”
It was April 15, 2023 when the regular Sudanese army and the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began clashing in the capital Khartoum. Over the next three years, the fighting turned into a bloody civil war which today involves a large part of the territory of Sudan, which is the third largest country on the African continent and one of the poorest in the world. Humanitarian workers report, as a consequence of the clashes, the systematic dismantling of essential services on which the population relies, including healthcare, food and basic protection and security.
Around 14 million people have been forced to flee, 9 million displaced within Sudan and 4.4 million across the border. For many, displacement has been a repeated and exhausting cycle of fleeing to relative safety, only to have to flee again. Today one in four Sudanese is displaced.
Despite its severity, this humanitarian crisis appears to be too complex and too local to be of interest to international public opinion. «Not one forgotten crisis but an abandoned crisis”as Denise Brown, United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Sudan, defined it. From here UNHCR’s appeal to donate.
War rape, a mass weapon in Sudan
«In these three years of conflict the episodes of sexual violence, initially opportunistic, have become systematic: mass rapeswar rapes that undermine the body and psyche of the victims but also disintegrate communities.”
In a refugee camp in Chad, where dwindling aid funding threatens to disrupt life-saving assistance. © UNHCR/Ala Kheir
Violence continues across much of Darfur, Kordofan and Blue Nile State. And in particular they increase violence against women and girlsincluding sexual ones: a risk increased by 80% from 2024 and 350% since the start of the conflict. «In these three years the crisis has gone from acute to chronic and stratified, with violence normalized», explains Vadalà.
Collective shame silences the victims
War rape refers to intentional, systematic, strategic sexual violence: the objectives why it is perpetrated are different. «Bringing terror to a community and force her to flee. Destroy the social fabric, insulting womenin whose womb impure generations will grow. Humiliating men that these women are unable to protect. There collective shame necessarily silences the victims.” The most exposed women, explains the UNHCR operator, are those alone: widows, the elderly, unaccompanied young people, people with disabilities.
Sudan, the terror of stigma and the impossibility of reporting
«Every survivor brings with them not only physical trauma. His identity is violated: let us remember that in a traditionalist society like that of Sudan, purity means honor. A raped woman is dishonored: guilty, she is repudiated by her husband, excluded from the community. And the same fate befalls the children of rape, often breaking any ties with the family of origin.”
Antonia Vadala, UNHCR operator.
In such a context, reporting means exposing oneself: it means risking being believed guilty rather than victim, and thus losing any protection.
Aisha’s story, however, is one with a happy ending: «I saw her several times», explains Antonia. “Her confession allowed us to help her: a doctor examined her and treated her.” And as the body heals, even the wounds of the soul can slowly stop bleeding.
