On March 6, 2025, the United Nations (UN) Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned that many children in the conflicts among militias in Sudan are at risk of rape and other forms of sexual violence which are being used as weapons of war. In November 2024, the Association of World Citizens (AWC) had highlighted that rape was being used as a weapon of war in the Sudan conflicts and that strong counter measures are needed.
“There are numerous types of rape. Rape is committed to boast the soldiers’ morale, to feed soldiers’ hatred of the enemy, their sense of superiority, and to keep them fighting; rape is one kind of war booty; women are raped because war intensifies men’s sense of entitlement, superiority, avidity and social license to rape; rape is a weapon of war used to spread political terror; rape can destabilize a society and break its resistance; rape is a form of torture; gang rapes in public terrorize and silence women and force them to flee homes, families and communities; rape targets women because they keep the civilian population functioning and are essential to its social and physical continuity; rape is used in ethnic cleansing; it is designed to drive women from their homes or destroy the possibility of reproduction; genocidal rape treats women as reproductive vessels to make them bear babies of the rapists’ nationality, ethnicity, race or religion, and genocidal rape aggravates women’s terror and future stigma, producing a class of outcast mothers and children – this is rape committed with consciousness of how unacceptable a raped woman is to the patriarchal community and to herself. This list combines individual and group motives with obedience to military command; in doing so, it gives a political context to violence against women, and it is this political context that needs to be incorporated in the social response to rape.”
The AWC first raised the issue of rape as a weapon of war in the UN Commission on Human Rights in March 2001 after the judgement of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) maintained that there can be no time limitation on bringing an accused to trial. The Tribunal also reinforced the possibility of universal jurisdiction – that a person can be tried not only by his national court but by any court claiming universal jurisdiction and where the accused is present.
As Citizens of the World, we need to have a peace-building approach which asks: How does a political conflict degenerate into pervasive mass violence, generating new crises and new forms of violent conflict in the future? Even after a war ends, the effects of sexual violence continue in the form of unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections, discrimination and ostracizing of victims and often lasting psychological damage. Thus, we must ask how a community pulls itself out from the cycle of violence and creates new attitudes to promote human dignity and develop new institutions of conflict resolution.
Prof. René Wadlow is President of the Association of World Citizens.
Association of World Citizens 