More than 200 children were raped in Sudan since the beginning of 2024, UN children's agency says

In this photograph released by UNICEF, a 16-year-old rape victim rests on a mattress at a UNICEF office in Sudan, Dec. 2, 2024. (Tess Ingram/UNICEF via AP)

CAIRO — Warning: This article contains disturbing content. Reader discretion is advised.

Children in conflict-ravaged Sudan as young as a year old have been raped since the beginning of 2024, according to the UN 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 per cent 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.

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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Fatma Khaled, The Associated Press