Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sabine Lee, Professor in Modern History, University of Birmingham
I was in Khartoum when the conflict started. Armed soldiers of Arabs came to our house and they wanted to loot groundnuts, but my mother resisted opening the door. Immediately, one soldier shot her. I screamed but three of the soldiers surrounded me. They grabbed me and I was taken behind a building where ten soldiers raped me. Nobody came to rescue me because my mom was already shot dead and neighbours ran away. After two days, when my mom was buried, I joined others to come to South Sudan.
This girl’s story was shared with us near the Aweil border crossing between South Sudan and Sudan, and it mirrors what we heard from many others. In the sweltering heat of July 2024 – and with mud underfoot and rainwater pooling along the road – South Sudanese members of our international team asked people to share stories about experiences of women and girls making the perilous journey between the two countries. The accounts they shared were harrowing, urgent, and clear.
We spoke with nearly 700 returnees and forced migrants – women and men, girls and boys – many of whom shared similar experiences of being terrorised by soldiers and armed militias on both sides of the Sudan civil war. The war has been tearing the country apart since 2023 and has led to the deaths of more than 150,000 people.
The struggle for power between Sudan’s army and a powerful paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has led to a famine and claims of a genocide in the western Darfur region. The RSF was formed in 2013 and has its origins in the notorious Janjaweed militia that fought rebels in Darfur, where they were accused of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the region’s non-Arab population. New reports about massacres and atrocities continue to emerge.
As the crisis deepens, our research has revealed that sexual and gender-based violence is a major driver of migration to South Sudan. Over half of our participants said it was the main reason they sought sanctuary across the border, with adolescent girls, aged 13 to 17, being far more likely to state that sexual violence was the reason they had to migrate.
The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.
The research, which was recently published in Conflict and Health , uncovered multiple harrowing accounts of gang rapes and murder, some on children as young as 12.
What is happening in South Sudan and Sudan?
Since its independence in 2011, South Sudan has remained among the most fragile states globally, plagued by chronic political instability and humanitarian crises. Following internal divisions, a devastating civil war, fought largely along ethnic lines, erupted in 2013. This conflict resulted in nearly 400,000 deaths and an estimated 2.3 million people forcibly displaced, including 800,000 to Sudan. Another two million people were internally displaced within South Sudan, severely undermining state-building efforts. The country has remained on a knife-edge with the UN stating in October that it is on the brink of returning to all-out civil war.
The outbreak of war in Sudan in 2023 further exacerbated South Sudan’s fragilities and vulnerabilities, jeopardised peace efforts and worsened the existing humanitarian crisis. The Sudan conflict triggered a massive influx, this time with over 1.2 million refugees and returnees crossing into South Sudan – placing immense pressure on already overstretched resources and services.
Read more:
Why has Sudan descended into mass slaughter? The answer goes far beyond simple ethnic conflict
As of 2024, over 9.3 million people in South Sudan – more than 70% of the population – required humanitarian assistance, with 7.8 million facing acute food insecurity. Over 2.3 million children were at risk of malnutrition, with some regions nearing famine conditions.
Even before 2023, South Sudan was among the highest-ranking countries for sexual and gender-based violence globally, having the second-highest rates in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The border between Sudan and South Sudan has long been a corridor of cyclical displacement, shaped by decades of war, famine, and political instability. However, the scale and complexity of the current crisis has intensified vulnerabilities, particularly for women and girls. The effects have manifested in rape, sexual abuse, trafficking, and forced prostitution – on both sides of the border.
Fleeing sexual violence and terror
We focused our study on that border and the people who were fleeing through it. We used “sensemaking” methodology (based on the principle that storytelling is an intuitive way to convey complex information and helps people make sense of their experiences) to document what happened to women on their journeys and the risks they faced in the South Sudanese settlements. We had adopted a similar approach when examining accounts of sexual exploitation by UN peacekeepers in Haiti and DRC.
The fieldwork team – three female and three male researchers from the not-for-profit STEWARDWOMEN – worked on the border of Aweil North for two weeks to collect these stories. STEWARDWOMEN is a women-led South Sudanese organisation which aims to address violence against women, including sexual violence.
Our team collected 695 stories from 671 people. The vast majority were South Sudanese returning to a country they had once fled (98%), and most were women of child-bearing age (88%). Over half of the stories were first-person accounts of their own migration, while others were shared by men about their female relatives.
The aim was to make sure people felt safe and empowered to speak openly. Josephine Chandiru Drama, a South Sudanese human rights lawyer and former director of STEWARDWOMEN, said:
By inviting women and girls to share their migration experiences in their own words, the data collectors honoured their agency and voice. This approach fostered trust, reduced retraumatisation, and yielded richer, more authentic narratives that reflect the lived realities of displacement.
‘They took the girls by force’
While violence is forcing families to flee Sudan, the risk is not shared equally. Our findings show how adolescent girls are disproportionately at the greatest risk.
Girls face acute danger that families often can’t easily prevent. Armed groups raid homes and camps, abducting girls or seizing them on roads and at checkpoints. Girls are singled out and subjected to sexual harassment and rape.
Parents may try to travel in groups, change routes, or hide their daughters, but when men with guns stop a bus or enter a village at night, their protection options are limited. These risks intensify as poverty deepens and safe transport is scarce. These conditions leave girls visible, isolated, and at risk. One woman told us how they were attacked:
… the rebel car came towards us. They took the girls by force and they raped us, the men could not do anything to protect us. What hurts is raping you in open even when the men are seeing us … what the Arabs did to women and girls was terrible and it is not only me going through it.
Another woman shared a desperately traumatic story about the rape and murder of her daughter. She said:
My 12-year-old daughter was raped by a group of soldiers and died instantly. This is a very sad story to tell but I have to talk about it so that the world can know what happened to women and girls in Sudan … The soldiers then raped all the five girls … Unfortunately, my raped little daughter died on the roadside … It was such a painful moment …
Our data confirmed this terrifying reality. When we looked at the responses by age, a statistically significant pattern emerged: adolescent girls, aged 13 to 17, were far more likely than older women to state that sexual violence was the reason they had to migrate.
We asked participants to place the experience they shared on a spectrum: was sexual violence the reason for migrating, or did it happen because of migrating? For adolescent girls, the answers clustered overwhelmingly at one end: sexual violence was the trigger, not a consequence of the journey.
It is possible that among older women sexual violence has become somewhat normalised after surviving previous conflicts in the region, compounded by the fact that younger, unmarried girls are specifically targeted for abduction and forced marriage. One girl explained what happened to her sister:
As we travelled to look for safety in our motherland of South Sudan … all the women and girls were ordered out of the car… and were raped by a group of five soldiers. As an innocent young girl, my 15-year-old sister tried to resist […] and she was beaten badly, raped by all the five soldiers and then killed … We were ordered to leave, and my sister was no more.
‘I came here … to change my life’
One young woman – barely out of her teens – reported feeling ashamed and embarrassed, as she told us about how they were attacked while fleeing to South Sudan.
… we were suddenly attacked by the militia and I was among the eight girls to be abducted. I was raped by four repeatedly for two days … The rape made me miscarry a three-month old baby and I contracted syphilis.
While violence is not unexpected in war, when we analysed the stories, a stark pattern emerged: overall 53% of participants specifically identified sexual and gender-based violence as a major reason to flee, and across every age group it was the primary driver. For many, it wasn’t simply a consequence of war – it was the final straw in the decision to leave Sudan.
The stories brought this data to life. A mother recounted the death of her child along the migration route, a direct result of the violence they were escaping. One man described how his wife and daughter were abducted along the route, leaving him to care for four other children and wondering whether they were still alive. He said:
It pains me a lot because I don’t know whether they are alive. Information circulates that most of the women and girls who were abducted were mob raped and many died. Maybe my wife and her daughter are victims.
These stories, like those of countless other women and their families, illustrate clearly that sexual violence was not a mere background noise to war – it was indeed the breaking point that sent them on the road. As one woman told us, the sexual violence she feared prompted her family to migrate to South Sudan:
My husband was taken by the Rapid Support Forces and I was stabbed when I refused to be raped by those men, I even still have the scar. I came here [to South Sudan] to change my life.
In the Aweil North temporary settlement, Kiir Adem, the team found shocking conditions. Designed as a short-term shelter, prior to resettlement by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), many people had been there for three months or longer. Some had been registered as refugees or returnees, others had not. All were struggling to survive without adequate food or shelter, and with no access to desperately needed healthcare.
Chandiru Drama said: “Due to rampant looting and robbery along the journey, countless individuals reached their destination stripped of essentials – no food, no clothing, no supplies.”
The reality after crossing
After crossing the border to relative safety in South Sudan, returnees and refugees were met with a new set of struggles: lack of infrastructure, limited access to medical care, and few humanitarian provisions.
Unlike in better established reception centres along the border, Kiir Adem had little in the way of support. The nearest health centre was over two hours away by car, an often impossible journey for exhausted, injured women and girls who had been robbed of any money or supplies they had carried. One woman told us:
It took me six days to reach South Sudan border. At the border, I reported the rape case but no treatment was given to me. The IOM officials referred me to health facilities in Gok Marchar which is about 50km but it was very far that I couldn’t travel and I didn’t have money for transport.
It is crucial for survivors of rape to receive prophylactic treatments and other emergency sexual and reproductive healthcare as soon as possible post-assault. Some participants detailed devastating physical injuries resulting from sexual violence, and still others were pregnant when raped or became pregnant as a result of rape. In these cases, the lack of medical care may result in dire outcomes.
Returnees were left, in many cases, to piece together their own makeshift shelters and to forage for food in the forests. The area was prone to flooding, with researchers having to wade through water to get to people. One woman said:
I travelled to South Sudan in April 2024 with two children. I am now stranded with my children because my husband ran away when the Arabs were rampantly sexually assaulting women … I never know whether he is alive or not. There were two girls who were also abducted during the migration to South Sudan. I am now in the returnees camp sleeping in grass thatched huts, a lot of rain, no tents, no food.
When asked how often they struggle to make ends meet, over 80% of women and girls responded, “all the time or most of the time”. Informal settlements, like the one where we collected data, have been developed along the length of the Sudan-South Sudan border.
The porousness of the border, regular movement across the border in times of relative peace, and the difficulties accessing formal crossing points make it near-impossible to effectively channel displaced peoples through formal crossing points and into comparatively well-serviced settlements. Improved services, including transports to official settlements and for medical care, are urgently needed in the border region to meet the high needs of returnees wherever they are located.
Urgent response needed
There must now be a shift in humanitarian response – from reactive service provision to proactive, survivor-centred protection strategies. For example, NGOs should increase activities along known migration routes and along the border and humanitarian aid funding must be increased by donor governments. The UN peacekeeping mission could also increase protection of civilian activities in South Sudanese border regions, in partnership with South Sudanese civil society organisations.
Sexual violence is not simply collateral damage of the war in Sudan. For many girls and their families, it is the primary catalyst for flight. The pervasive threat of abduction and rape is a key driver of migration, shaping who flees, when they flee, and compelling women and girls to take the unimaginable risks for a chance of safety in South Sudan.
Read more:
‘People who spent years saving lives are now struggling to survive’ – how we witnessed Trump’s USAID cuts devastate health programmes in Kenya
Since our data collection in the summer of 2024, the situation in Sudan has not improved and the security context in South Sudan has worsened. On the southern side of the border, increased conflict between ethnically-based armed groups and an uptick in political tensions between President Salva Kiir and first Vice-President Riek Machar, including the house arrest and subsequent treason trial against Machar, have stoked fears of a possible return to war in South Sudan.
Combined with increased economic pressures and spillover effects from the war in Sudan, South Sudan’s political and security status is increasingly precarious. The risk of South Sudan returning to war increases the urgency with which returnees must be resettled and their immediate needs met. The risks of increased conflict and violence will disproportionately impact those who are already displaced and vulnerable. Legally trained NGO personnel could help here by advancing criminal investigations which in turn could inform service provision.
International law has also been very slow to react. It was only in October this year that judges at the International Criminal Court advanced the first conviction for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur in 2003 and 2004. Victims and survivors of the current war should not have to wait more than 20 years for trials.
The international community should work with women’s organisations, Sudanese and South Sudanese lawyers and human rights defenders to advance justice now, in whatever way is possible.
This could include survivor-centred investigations and evidence gathering, community justice initiatives, and safe spaces for survivors to begin their healing.
Women-led civil society organisations are well placed to support the immediate needs of women and girls, but they need support. Funding cuts have hit these organisations hard around the world, with many at risk of shutting down.
Chandiru Drama added: “If civil society organisations are to continue performing their lifesaving work, they must be funded at scale. This is not just a funding issue – it’s a justice issue … Because in the face of unimaginable violence, these groups are not just service providers – they are lifelines.”
The women and girls we met were clear: sexual violence forced their decision to run. If they are to stop running, an urgent response is needed: resettlement, humanitarian support, and justice must be prioritised.
For you: more from our Insights series:
To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.
Sabine Lee received funding from the XCEPT Cross-Border Research and the Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) research programme, which funded the research detailed herein.
Heather Tasker receives funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), International Development Research Council (IDRC), and the XCEPT Cross-Border Research and the Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) research programme. XCEPT funded the research detailed herein.
Susan Bartels received funding from the Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) research programme, which funded the research presented in this article. She also receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
– ref. ‘I have to talk about it so that the world can know what happened to women and girls in Sudan’ – rape and terror sparks mass migration – https://theconversation.com/i-have-to-talk-about-it-so-that-the-world-can-know-what-happened-to-women-and-girls-in-sudan-rape-and-terror-sparks-mass-migration-269456
