I will never forget the teacher who negotiated to be gang-raped instead of her daughter. These war crimes against women must be addressed | Hala Alkarib

Since April 2023, Sudan’s women and girls have been subjected to systematic rape and sexual torture. Specialised support and justice for them is key to the country’s recovery and future In a village in South Darfur, I met a young girl about my daughter’s age – six or seven years old – who touched my hand and said: “I was taken by the Janjaweed.” This was more than 20 years ago, during the first Darfur crisis, and at the time, that was the term women and girls used as we struggled to articulate the scale of violence against civilians, especially sexual violence. I saw my daughter in that little girl, and I saw myself in her mother. It was my first encounter with conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) in Sudan. In the years since, I’ve seen how successive regimes and insurgents in Sudan deliberately utilise sexual violence to sustain their grip on power. Perpetrators use it to seize land, force displacement, extract resources, loot communities, silence women and communities, and strip women of their agency. I’ve also seen that it can happen to anyone, depending on their proximity to those in power. In Darfur and South Kordofan, generations of women have endured repeated waves of CRS