The Forgotten Sudan series began by tracing how a fragile postcolonial state collided with an international and regional order too divided by its own interests to stop what was coming. Some actors are profiting from Sudan’s resources even as its people starve, flee, and die; others are simply unwilling or unable to act. Now we turn to the first chapter of the Sudanese tragedy itself: what war does to bodies.

Since Sudanese protesters first took to the streets of Atbara in December 2018, demanding an end to Omar al-Bashir’s three-decade rule, the regime’s security and military apparatus, including the security services, the army, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), was never on the side of the protesters. By the time RSF fighters, backed by police and security personnel, moved to disperse the sit-in outside army headquarters in Khartoum on June 3, 2019, killing at least 120 people, it was clear these forces would stop at nothing to cling to power, even if the price were the bodies of the protesters themselves.

That massacre was the opening scene, not an isolated one, in a much longer story of sexual violence used as an instrument of power in Sudan. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court classifies sexual violence as a crime against humanity when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population, with knowledge of that attack, listing under this heading: rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, and any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity.

Nearly all of these forms have recurred across two distinct chapters of Sudan’s conflict: the 2019 crackdown on the sit-in, and the war that has raged since April 2023, during which the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights documented at least 546 incidents of sexual violence affecting 838 victims across 16 of Sudan’s 18 states. The incidents were concentrated most extensively in Darfur and, more recently, during the siege and fall of El Fasher.

Across both chapters, the list of documented forms has expanded further still, to include practices not explicitly named in the Rome Statute’s original text. The bodies of Sudanese women, girls, and, in some cases, men and boys have become sites where nearly all of these forms of violence converge.

Since war broke out between the army and the Rapid Support Forces in April 2023, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has documented at least 546 incidents of sexual violence affecting 838 victims (539 women, 284 girls, 8 men, 7 boys) across 16 of Sudan’s 18 states, with roughly 87% attributed to men in RSF uniform and allied fighters, and gang rape alone accounting for nearly a quarter of these incidents.

The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan found that the abduction and detention of women and girls for sexual purposes constituted a situation in which “the RSF exercised powers of ownership over the victims,” amounting to the crime of sexual slavery including cases of women held in chains, blindfolded, and detained hundreds of kilometers from where they were abducted, subjected to repeated rape throughout their captivity. This built on an earlier statement by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in November 2023, which documented the abduction of women and girls in RSF-controlled areas of Darfur, with reports of them being seen chained inside vehicles.

Alongside this, a report by the humanitarian organization ACAPS, an independent humanitarian analysis organization, documented cases of young girls being forced into marriage with RSF fighters in Khartoum. Families often agreed to these marriages only after the RSF had cut off their access to basic necessities, leaving dowry payments as one of the few ways left to feed themselves; a choice made under starvation, not a free one.

In a statement issued on El Fasher^[1] after its fall, independent UN experts warned that displaced women “are being trafficked for sexual slavery and other forms of sexual exploitation.” They noted a rising risk of trafficking as displaced women crossed into Chad. The experts also documented the gang rape of 25 women at a checkpoint near El Fasher University, alongside cases of girls aged 15 to 17 raped near RSF checkpoints as they fled the city.

This pattern has been described as “sex for survival”: control over crossing points and aid distribution exploited to coerce displaced women into providing sexual services in exchange for protection or safe passage.

Men and boys were not spared this targeting either. The 2024 UN Fact-Finding Mission documented cases in which men and boys in detention were subjected to “rape, threats of rape, forced nudity and beating on the genitals“. This same pattern of public sexual humiliation had already been documented during the 2019 sit-in dispersal, when protesters were forced to partially strip and crawl through sewage water.

As for forced pregnancy, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) documented at least 59 cases of pregnancy resulting from rape. The report noted that ethnic identity played a clear role in the selection of victims. In West Darfur, RSF fighters reportedly asked women about their tribal affiliation before assaulting them. In one documented case, a fighter told a Masalit survivor: “This year, all of you will deliver our children.” This statement suggests that the pregnancies were intended not merely as a consequence of sexual violence, but as a deliberate tool to alter the region’s ethnic composition.

Why Sexual Violence Becomes a Weapon of War

The widespread use of sexual violence in Sudan cannot be explained by a single motive. Rather, it is driven by several overlapping factors that reinforce one another:

1. Impunity: Violence Without Consequences

The RSF, the direct successor to the Janjaweed militias, inherited a long history of impunity for atrocities committed in Darfur. Since the outbreak of the current conflict in April 2023, the OHCHR has repeatedly warned that entrenched impunity continues to fuel widespread violations, including conflict-related sexual violence. Despite extensive documentation accountability remains largely absent. This lack of consequences creates an environment in which fighters have little reason to fear punishment for rape, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy, or other forms of sexual violence.

2. Terror and Forced Displacement

Sexual violence is used to destroy the sense of safety necessary for civilian life. Many of the assaults documented in Sudan were committed in front of relatives, neighbors, or other civilians, demonstrating that the intended audience extended far beyond the immediate victim. These attacks communicate that no one is beyond the reach of armed actors and that remaining in the area carries unbearable risks. In this way, rape becomes a powerful instrument of forced displacement. Families flee not only because of shelling or hunger but because the social fabric of their communities has been deliberately shattered through public humiliation and fear.

3. Ethnic Persecution and Collective Punishment

The third motive is revenge against communities believed to have allied with, or provided aid to, the opposing side. Here sexual violence intersects directly with the ethnic dimension: when a victim is asked to disclose her tribal affiliation before being assaulted, as the Fact-Finding Mission has repeatedly documented in Darfur, the body becomes an instrument of collective punishment against an entire group, not an individual.

What Consequences Beyond the Battlefield

The impact of this crime does not end when the violence occurs. UN and human rights reports acknowledge that documented cases, even when significant in number, represent only a fraction of the true scale of these violations. Accessing survivors and collecting their testimonies remains extremely difficult amid an ongoing war, where armed actors target humanitarian workers and restrict access to affected communities. In addition, many survivors fear social stigma and may choose not to disclose what happened to them. Therefore, every documented figure should be understood as a minimum estimate, not the full extent of the violations.

This stigma is no marginal detail but is one of the harshest consequences of this crime in a society like Sudan’s. Amnesty International, in earlier reports on Darfur, documented cases of married women “disowned” by their husbands after being raped, and another survivor who became pregnant from an assault without even knowing her rapist’s identity, only to find herself socially ostracized along with her child, sometimes regarded as the “enemy’s child.”

This same pattern of rejection continues to repeat itself today in refugee camps in Chad, where young survivors describe, according to an Al Jazeera investigation, how pregnancies resulting from rape tore apart their family fabric and plunged them into deep psychological isolation. This was compounded by the near-total collapse of Sudan’s health system and the absence of any organized psychological support for survivors after the direct assault had ended.

Conclusion: A Crime Without Consequences

Seven years have passed between the massacre at army headquarters and the atrocities in El Fasher, and the Sudanese body have continued to bear the consequences of a conflict in which sexual violence has become a central instrument of power. Sexual violence here is no longer collateral damage to the fighting; it has become part of the warring parties’ own strategy: a cheap, high-impact instrument of terror that requires no advanced weaponry, only soldiers who know no one will ever hold them to account. As long as judicial accountability remains absent, and international mediation continues to treat this file as a humanitarian footnote rather than a political precondition, El Fasher will not be the last stop on this road, but rather a brief pause before the next chapter of the same crime.

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^[1] The capital of North Darfur State in western Sudan. Before recent developments in the conflict, it was the last major city in Darfur not under the control of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Since April 2023, the city has endured prolonged siege, repeated attacks, and severe humanitarian conditions, displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians.