Sudan: RSF fighters “raped mothers in front of their daughters,” says report

Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RST) raped women in front of their children and husbands, gang-raped girls as young as nine, and abducted women for rape in the capital Khartoum, according to a new report.

Human Rights Watch released a new report on Monday entitled Khartoum is not safe for women which documented a litany of sexual violence against women from both sides of Sudan’s ongoing civil war.

The human rights group spoke to several doctors, social workers, lawyers and volunteers in Khartoum and its twin cities of Bahri and Omdurman who are on the front lines treating women and children – including young boys and men – who have been raped or subjected to sexual violence by RSF and the Sudan National Army (SAF).

HRW identified at least 262 survivors of sexual violence between the ages of nine and 60 through interviews with health care providers.

The human rights group said researchers conducted 42 interviews from outside the country because they were barred from entering the country due to restrictions and heavy fighting.

Both sides are accused of bombing medical facilities and denying civilians caught in the crossfire of the civil war access to urgently needed medical care.

One volunteer described the case of an RSF fighter who raped a 50-year-old woman in Omdurman, an area under RSF control in the early stages of the war.

The volunteer said the woman asked RSF to rape her “in place” of her two daughters, who were in their early twenties, after they raided her house. RSF fighters raped the mother and beat the daughters.

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Another health worker in Khartoum said they had been informed of a case of “a mother and her four daughters who were raped in front of their father and brothers.”

The volunteer added: “They could not leave their homes because the RSF had put them under a kind of house arrest. These women were raped repeatedly for days. One of the daughters was pregnant when they were able to reach us.”

SAF soldiers are also accused of gang raping women and girls in Khartoum.

Due to the climate of fear surrounding sexual violence, Sudanese midwives observe that women in Khartoum are in a constant state of fear.

One woman told HRW that the situation had become so bad that she now sleeps with a “knife” under her pillow for fear of rape and imprisonment by the RSF.

“We are constantly afraid of RSF raids on our homes. We cannot sleep because of fear. Every day a house is raided; they try to rape women,” one woman told HRW.

Increase in violence

Service providers told HRW that a significant proportion of the victims of sexual violence they provided assistance to in Khartoum were girls under 18, including one nine-year-old child.

A psychologist documented 25 survivors between May and October and found that at least “80 percent of the cases recorded … were between 12 and 18 years old.”

The psychologist added that most survivors told RSF that they were “married and not virgins because they thought that could protect them from rape.”

Rescue workers who spoke to HRW said they were also raped while trying to help survivors of sexual violence in Khartoum.

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The rise in cases of sexual violence has also led to many women and girls visiting hospitals seeking abortions, but they face difficulties in obtaining them because medical staff are “unwilling, inadequately equipped or too afraid to perform an abortion”.

Volunteers who spoke to HRW also found that legal hurdles prevented many survivors from accessing abortion services. Some told activists they faced or feared police intimidation when they tried to report a rape by SAF forces.

Others spoke of cultural factors and lack of privacy that prevented many women from considering legal abortion because their doctors either refused to perform the procedure or medical facilities lacked confidential space to do so.

A doctor in Khartoum spoke of a “major crisis in the training of medical staff in dealing with cases of sexual violence” and “survivors fear that privacy is not protected in hospitals… there is a lack of private spaces to examine survivors.”

“In public hospitals, the survivor has to talk about what happened to her in an open room with a number of doctors and patients.”

This report builds on previous UN work from November 2023, which addressed reports of widespread sexual violence and its use as a “tool of war to subjugate, terrorize, disrupt and punish women and girls as a means of punishing specific communities targeted by the RSF and allied militias.”

“There are too few private spaces to examine survivors”

– A doctor in Khartoum

Sudan’s Foreign Minister Babikir Elamin disputed the report’s findings, saying that as far as the Sudanese Armed Forces are concerned, “this report contains unsubstantiated allegations that were obviously never cross-examined or submitted to the SAF for comment.”

“We categorically reject the defamatory claim by the author of the report that the SAF or the Sudanese government at any time condoned sexual violence.

“The allegation that the SAF specifically targeted healthcare providers is also untrue. The report provides no evidence to support this allegation.”

Currently, hospitals and health facilities in the areas controlled and protected by the SAF are only operational in these areas. This affects about 400 of the 540 government hospitals.

“Contrary to the report’s claims that the SAF is blocking the delivery of medical supplies, it is the SAF that is protecting, guarding and often delivering these supplies, including by airdrop,” Elamin added.

RSF rejected HRW’s claims in its report, saying it does not occupy any hospitals or medical centers in Khartoum. It did not comment on the claims or provide any evidence that it had investigated allegations of sexual violence by its forces.