More than 200 children were raped in Sudan since the beginning of 2024,
UN children's agency says
[March 04, 2025]
By FATMA KHALED
CAIRO (AP) — Children in conflict-ravaged Sudan as young as a year old
have been raped since the beginning of 2024, according to the U.N.
children's agency Tuesday, which said sexual violence is being used as a
tactic of war.
UNICEF said 221 children, including boys, were raped by armed men,
according to records compiled by gender-based violence service providers
in the North African nation.
The war in Sudan broke out in April 2023 between the military and its
rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces with battles in Khartoum and
around the country. Since then, at least 20,000 people have been killed,
though the number is likely far higher. The war has driven more than 14
million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into
famine.
Right groups say that atrocities, including sexual violence and forced
child marriages, have been committed by both sides. An estimated 61,800
children have been internally displaced since the war began, UNICEF
reported last month.
On Tuesday, the agency reported documented cases involving children who
were raped during attacks on cities.
More than 30% of the child rape victims were boys, UNICEF said. The
victims include 16 children under the age of 5 and four infants. The
cases were reported in the states of Gedaref, Kassala, Gezeira,
Khartoum, River Nile, Northern State, South Kordofan, North Darfur and
West Darfur.
Of the 221 children raped, 73 cases were conflict-related and 71 were
not, while the others were unidentified, Tess Ingram, a spokesperson
with UNICEF, told The Associated Press.
“In a culture of really serious social stigma and at a time when access
to services has been severely hampered, the fact that this group came
forward tells us that it is only a small sample," she said. “It is only
the tip of the iceberg of what are undoubtedly hundreds more children
who have been raped.”
Survivors are often reluctant to report that they were subject to sexual
violence due to social stigma and fear of retribution from armed groups
and rejection from family.
UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said in the report that
sexual violence, including rape, is “being used as a tactic of war” in
violation of international law and laws protecting children.
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In this photograph released by UNICEF, a 16-year rape victim rests
on a mattress at a UNICEF office in Sudan, Dec. 2, 2024. According
to UNICEF, the girl and her 19- year- old sister, were kidnapped,
beaten and raped by soldiers for four months, before they escaped
and later learned they were both pregnant.(Tess Ingram/UNICEF via
AP)
The SIHA Network, a nonprofit organization that documents violence
against women and girls, said last month that around 23% of the
conflict-related sexual violence it documented since the war began
involved girls. In South Kordofan, a boy was raped at gunpoint and
several children, including a 6-year-old, were also raped. They were
all out picking fruit.
Ingram, who was in Sudan in December, said she met with victims who
“endured horrors that no person would want to experience in their
lifetime, and in the aftermath of those horrors, their suffering
doesn’t stop.”
She said many of them dealt with physical injuries and “serious
psychological scars,”, including a girl who experienced seizures
linked to her trauma and others who told Ingram they attempted
suicide.
A girl from Omdurman who gave recorded testimony to UNICEF, which
was shared with AP, said she moved multiple times looking for
shelters as some displacement centers would turn her away after
learning that she got pregnant by her rapist.
An unidentified woman abducted by armed men recounted in a video
testimony harrowing details of her 19 days of captivity in a room
with four other women and girls. She was severely beaten and along
with the others forced to cook and clean for the men detaining them.
She said she was extremely depressed while held in captivity and
wanted to kill herself.
She recounted how one of the girls, a 15-year-old, was detained
after being kidnapped by two men who forced her to swallow pills.
The girl would often be transferred to another room for rape by
random men.
“I heard her screams, while she was getting raped. Every time she
was raped and came back to our room she was covered with blood,” the
woman said while crying and hyperventilating.
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