Overview
Sudan’s ongoing civil conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has produced one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Women and children are bearing a disproportionate burden — not merely as collateral casualties, but as deliberate targets. Translating this reality into justice outcomes requires specific, gender- and child-sensitive approaches.
Key Findings
Scale and Deliberateness of Violence
The RSF has inflicted widespread sexual violence on women and girls throughout Sudan’s civil war to humiliate, assert control, and displace communities. These atrocities — including rape, gang rape, and sexual slavery — amount to war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. (Amnesty International)
UNICEF’s analysis of 221 documented rape cases against children included victims as young as one year old (U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants), representing only a fraction of actual incidents given widespread under-reporting.
Barriers to Reporting and Justice
No survivors accessed timely post-rape care or reported attacks to Sudanese authorities, due to ongoing fighting or fear of stigma and reprisals. Some suffer kidney pains, irregular periods, walking difficulties, or long-term psychological trauma. (Amnesty International)
Collapsed Domestic Justice Systems
Sudan’s domestic institutions remain unwilling and unable to conduct credible investigations. They perpetuate selective justice, shield perpetrators through immunities and amnesties, and continue to deny survivors any real prospect of redress. (OHCHR)
Mental Health Crisis
Survivors are increasingly contemplating suicide as a means of escaping ongoing horrors, underscoring the scale of the mental health crisis among women and girls and the lack of access to support in areas where systems have completely collapsed. (OHCHR)
Impunity as Accelerant
The RSF’s sexual violence occurred openly, in front of other soldiers and civilians, indicating perpetrators felt no fear of consequences — a dynamic that emboldens further atrocities.
Three Practical Recommendations
- Establish Trauma-Informed, Gender-Sensitive Evidence Collection Protocols
Dedicated teams combining legal investigators with psychosocial specialists must be deployed to document survivor testimony safely. Statements should meet ICC evidentiary standards while minimising re-traumatisation. Mobile units are essential given the collapse of physical infrastructure.
- Support an Independent International Judicial Mechanism
Given domestic court failures, the international community must back the ICC and establish an independent judicial mechanism for Sudan, while using universal jurisdiction to hold perpetrators accountable and imposing targeted sanctions on those orchestrating atrocities. (OHCHR)
Project teams should actively advocate for and resource this mechanism.
- Fund Integrated Survivor Services Immediately
Justice cannot wait for a peace deal. Funding must be secured now for medical care (including sexual and reproductive health), legal aid, and psychosocial support — particularly for child survivors. Cuts to USAID-funded programmes have already created dangerous gaps that must be urgently filled by alternative donors.
Bottom Line
Without deliberate, child- and gender-centred interventions in both justice processes and humanitarian response, accountability will remain out of reach for Sudan’s most vulnerable victims.
