The state of Sudanese women's rights under the war

Introduction

Wars offer tangible proof of legal systems' failure to protect human rights. In armed conflict, children and women find themselves the vulnerable group and most often the foremost victims. When wars break out, a woman's basic rights are stripped doubly: she suffers like everyone else as a civilian besieged by violence, poverty and fear, and beyond that she is targeted in her bodily, social and psychological particularity, becoming an undeclared instrument of pressure between the warring powers — despite international standards calling for the protection of women's rights in particular.

This truth holds across most of the world's conflict zones, but the war in Sudan today offers a stark model of women's rights lost in wartime — a model closely resembling the condition of women in Gaza.

Whenever armed conflict erupts, the application of law recedes and deterrence disappears, opening the door to wide violations against women — above all sexual violence used as a weapon to terrorise communities and shake their cohesion. With judicial institutions absent, women lose the ability to seek help or redress and find themselves without real protection.

The conflict between the Sudanese armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces erupted in 2023, and this scene repeats with ever-greater violence: assaults on women and girls have risen without precedent while the legal systems collapsed, unable to protect them.

The violations facing women in Sudan raise the question of their present condition — particularly their rights, whose protection was the very purpose of conventions such as CEDAW (1979). The reality in Sudan, as in Gaza, has proven otherwise.

How has the war affected Sudanese women's rights?

The war marginalised women's most basic rights — those touching bodily safety and dignity directly: the rights to security and protection from violence, to justice, to housing and a dignified life, to food and water, to health and to reproductive health — through violence, above all rape, and the marginalisation of their right to health and care.

Legal systems have plainly failed to protect Sudanese women, who are directly targeted through sexual violence — among the most dangerous undeclared weapons of armed conflict, used to unravel social bonds and pressure communities. These violations drove the displacement of more than 11 million people, 54% of them women and girls — some 5.8 million women. Requests for services and help rose by 288%, reflecting the deepening crisis; the evidence indicates that women and girls of ethnic minorities are deliberately targeted, multiplying the physical and psychological toll.

Forced displacement means more than losing shelter: it exposes women and girls to rising danger of violence, exploitation, poverty and food insecurity, while they carry added responsibilities — caring for children and the elderly — in harsh, unfit conditions that leave no room for recovery.

Amnesty International has classified the Rapid Support Forces' violations — rape, gang rape and sexual exploitation — as war crimes and crimes against humanity, documenting the rape or gang rape of 36 women and girls, some as young as 15, across four Sudanese states between April 2023 and October 2024, alongside beatings and torture with blades, sometimes to the point of killing. Thirty women — mostly survivors and their families in refugee camps in Uganda — testified to the involvement of RSF elements, confirming their impunity and the absence of any mechanism of deterrence.

The war has also stripped women of work opportunities or loaded them with the burden of providing for families in the men's absence, as imports, exports and thousands of small enterprises that were women's economic mainstay collapsed — forcing many to depend on humanitarian aid as a last resort, deepening their exposure to economic and bodily exploitation.

Beyond violence, women in Sudan endure dire health conditions.

According to the World Food Programme, more than 24.6 million people suffer acute food insecurity — women above all, who by custom put the men first and eat last and least. WHO data indicate that 70–80% of health facilities in conflict areas are out of service or closed, raising deaths — mothers' especially — and halting reproductive-health and psychological-support services. Some 1.75 million women and girls of reproductive age urgently need sexual and reproductive health services; UNFPA delivered them across all eighteen states in early 2025 — emergency obstetric units, mobile clinics, medical supplies, staffing, training and rehabilitation of damaged infrastructure. Of the $145.7 million UNFPA sought for 2025, only about 27% has been funded — a gap of $105.9 million that prevents the programmes from reaching women and girls and sustaining their work.

Mariem Ghadamsi:

A fourth-year doctoral student who has taught two semesters at the Faculty of Legal, Political and Social Sciences in Tunis, specialising in private law, Islamic finance, and human rights — women's rights above all.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the view of Pal-Think for Strategic Studies.