One -year -olds among those raped, says un

Warning: This article contains details of sexual violence that some people may be considered upsetting

Armed men rape and sexually attack children as young people during the Sudan Civil War, says the UN Children’s Agency, UNICEF.

Mass sexual violence has been widely documented as a weapon of war in an almost two -year conflict of the country.

But the UNICEF report is the first detailed account of the influence of rape on young children in Sudan.

A third of the victims were boys, who usually face “unique challenges” in reporting such crimes and seeking help they need.

UNICEF says that, although 221 cases of rape against children have been officially reported since the beginning of 2024, the real number is likely to be much higher.

Sudan is a socially conservative country where a huge social stigma stops surviving and their families to talk about rape, as well as the fear of retaliation from the armed groups.

The UNICEF report provides a terrible window in abuse of children in the civil war in the country.

Perhaps his most resistant discovery is that 16 victims were under five, including four newborns.

UNICEF does not say who is responsible, but other UN investigations have blamed most of the rapes for paramilitary forces for fast support (RSF), saying that RSF fighters had a pattern of using sexual violence for terrorizing civilians and combating opposition to their progress.

The RSF, who is fighting this war against its former allies, the Sudanese armed forces, denied any abuse.

“The whole scale of sexual violence we documented in Sudan is astonishing,” said Mohamed Chande Othman, a UN Mission Chair for Determination of Facts when his previous report was published in October.

According to evidence presented by international human rights groups, victims in the RSF stronghold of Darfur were often targeted because they were black Africa, not Arab, obviously with the aim of throwing them out of Sudan.

The UN Humanitarian response to Sudan has already been financed enough. Recent cuts in American help will be expected to reduce programs that will further help the victims.

Reducing the details in the UNICEF report draws a terrible situation.

“After nine nights, someone opens the door, wearing a whip, choosing one of the girls and taking her to another room. I could hear the girl cry and scream. They raped her,” Omnia recalls (not her real name), the adult survived women who kept in the room with other women and girls in the room.

“Every time they raped her, this girl would return covered with blood. She is still just a small child. They just let these girls play at dawn, and they come back almost unconsciously. Each of them is crying and talking inconsistently. I spent over 19 days, I got to the point where I wanted to end my life.”

As a broken nation in the war, Sudan is one of the most challenging places on Earth to access services and workers in the first place.

A huge number of people displaced by war made women and children more vulnerable to attack-three of four girls at school are not at school, UN says.

The devastating outcome of these crimes is exacerbated by the fact that the victims have few places they can address for medical assistance, as many medical institutions have destroyed, robbed or occupied by warring parties.

Recent reduction in the US can endanger even limited services available to protect children.

UNICEF provided safe premises for children through a network of local activists who set what was known as emergency rooms to deal with crises in their communities.

The activists relied quite a bit on American assistance, and most of them were forced to close, according to the Sudanese coordinating committee that controls them.

In a broader sense, the UN organization dedicated to protecting women’s rights says that local organizations that run women are vital to support survivors from sexual violence. But they receive less than 2% of the total financing of the UN Humanitarian Fund.

The BBC learned that at least one of these local groups, known as “she leads”, was forced to close when US funds were stopped.

It was not a big expense, measured in tens of thousands of dollars, but made it possible for workers to reach about 35 survivors a month, said Sulaim Elkhalifa, a Sudanese defender of the human rights managing a government unit in the fight against the fight against a woman and helped organize a private initiative.

Those who have been raped by armed people “have no luxury of depressing,” she told the BBC.

War requirements – finding food, which need to escape – do not leave space to deal with trauma, she added.