Rape of one-year-old children: the crudest face of the war in Sudan

BarcelonaAlmost a year after the outbreak of violence in Sudan, which has been immersed in conflict since April, a civil conflict between the army and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the UN warns of the use of child rape as a weapon of war. Unicef, the United Nations agency for children, denounces in a report released on Tuesday More than 200 cases of sexual assault of children, including children as young as one year old. "Armed men rape and sexually assault children, including children as young as one year old," the organization says.

According to data collected on the ground, 221 rapes of minors have been recorded since the beginning of 2024. However, UNICEF already anticipates that this is a small part of the total cases. The reason is that survivors and their families often refuse to report for fear of stigma and social rejection, reprisals from armed groups or difficulties in accessing victim assistance services. The data released on Tuesday indicate that up to 147 of the raped children are girls (66%), sixteen are under 5 years old and four are only one year old.

"After nine o'clock at night, someone opens the door, carrying a whip in their hand. They select one of the girls and take her to another room. I could hear the girl crying and screaming. She was being raped. And every time she was raped, she came back covered in blood. She was still a child," says one of the children. The woman spent 19 days locked in a room with other victims. "The girls were only released at dawn, and they came back almost unconscious," she explains.

For Unicef ​​Executive Director Catherine Russell, "the fact that children so young are being raped by armed men should shock anyone and force immediate action." "Millions of children in Sudan are at risk of being raped and suffering other forms of sexual violence, which is being used as a tactic of war. This is an abhorrent violation of international law and could constitute a war crime. It must be stopped," she adds.

Although the report does not specify who is responsible for the violations, a report from last October The UN report pointed to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitaries. "It is part of a pattern aimed at terrorising and punishing civilians [...] and suppressing any opposition to their advances," it said, including among the paramilitaries' practices gang rapes and kidnappings and detention of victims "in conditions that amount to sexual slavery". The RSF, a militia with some 100,000 men, denies the accusations.

Fear of this situation is driving many women and girls to leave their homes to flee to other cities where they often end up in informal displacement sites or communities with few resources. And that, according to the UN, does not free them from the risk of sexual violence either. The consequences include childhood psychological trauma, isolation or, as already mentioned, family rejection, which is aggravated when there are cases of pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections or serious injuries.

"I was forced into a big car. I was taken to a place next to a railway and three people raped me. I couldn't confront my family about what happened to me [...] I'm now nine months pregnant. I was close to committing suicide," explains another victim.

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"Widespread sexual violence in Sudan has instilled terror in people, especially children," Russell warns. "Parties to the conflict, and those with influence, must do everything possible to end these grave violations against children. These scars of war are immeasurable and long-lasting," she concludes. The agency is working to establish "safe spaces" and care services for victims of gender-based violence, but calls on both the Sudanese government and the international community to protect children from the rawest part of the civil war in the African country.

It so happens that Sudan, where the war has already caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people and displaced more than 12 million, was one of the main destinations for US humanitarian aid programs, cancelled shortly after Donald Trump came to power. Local organizations dedicated to the protection of women and girls are key to offering support to survivors of sexual violence in the country, but they lack resources and their external funding is scarce. According to BBC reportsAt least one of these groups was forced to stop its activities when the US government turned off the tap of the international cooperation agency USAID.