'Not Another War in Africa!' I: Sudan

Thoughts on Sexual Violence

Issue #021

TW: sexual assault

Remember a little while ago, when virtually all the women of social media agreed they would rather encounter a wild bear in a forest than a lone man? Well, keep that in mind: I’ll be coming back to it.

First, I’ll jump into a time machine.

When I was in secondary school, there was a point when Sudan (and Darfur in particular) was the buzzword for ‘poor African populace needing our sympathy’. It was all over the news that the Janjaweed were committing atrocities and in adverts that titillated black suffering. This exposure to it was one of the first times I was really, truly affected by something happening in another part of the world apparently unconnected from me, a teenage brown girl living in England. Upon receiving homework related to what was happening (or perhaps it was that I chose to write an article on Darfur myself), I frantically, frenetically researched it on my laptop, learning a little of Sudan and the human capacity to destroy. It never really left my psyche and crystallised in me, binding itself to my empathetic core. The nascent activist within me used images from Darfur as the base of a story I wrote in the early hours of one morning, eyes wide from anger, horror and focus.

Then, as these things tend to, Sudan fell out of fashion. It would crop up now and then in the fringes of media, but became largely alien to most people.

In typical human fashion, this didn’t signify that all was peace and love in Sudan. Rather, it was a telling indictment on how easy it is for people to forget and to turn a blind eye. Not only that, but it highlighted once again how impatient humanity is: they can’t hear about the same old sob story for too long, or they’ll get desensitised to it!

Sudan began trickling back onto our screens and into our minds over recent years and then with more intensity in recent months. The sheer scale of starvation, death and turmoil had had enough time away from mainstream media to become en vogue again; it was time to strike the hearts of the global populace.

What we saw, in tandem with the genocides in Gaza and Congo, as well as the student uprisings in Bangladesh, was desperate. Darfur was back online, as were Khartoum and Gezira and words such as paramilitary and civil war and pillage and plunder and terror and the age-old image of the ordinary citizens suffering.

Then, only this month, we saw the ‘bear or man’ thought experiment explode on our screens in the context of war. Activists have reported that over 130 Sudanese women in villages south of Khartoum committed suicide following rape by members of the RSF paramilitary. Why? For them, death was more inviting than having to deal with the aftermath of sexual assault as well as the threat of it ever happening again.

This act by these women is as painful and pointed an example of the sheer degradation, shame and pain that rape has on women. In their actions, they made clear just how distinct rape is from all other forms of harm. Quite aside from the physical harm it inflicts on the person who is a victim of it, it is tied to a web of social and psychological implications.

I bring this up because women’s fear of sexual violence and rape is still often met with derision. When Saoirse Ronan recently quipped on The Graham Norton Show that ‘[self-defence] is what girls have to think about all the time’, her comment was completely misconstrued on social media and received a backlash that the actress herself said was ‘wild’. After all, how could she have the audacity to bring her ‘man-hating paranoia’ to a casual conversation?

It is in shame that we can trace the knots that tie together the idea that a woman would rather face the mauling of a bear than a potential molester to the mass suicide of women in war-torn Sudan to a white, privileged celebrity on a chat show. The symbolism of purity, sex and the feminine temptress that persists in the collective consciousness of much of the world holds the victim of rape responsible with the burden of proof. It is one of the only crimes that invades the privacy and dignity of a victim to such an extent that many would rather stifle themselves than speak out against their perpetrators. Those Sudanese women knew that quite aside from hoping someone would protect them from repeated attacks or punish the perpetrators, they would have to face dishonour and the stain of simply being touched by a man. Consent isn’t even a variable in this picture.

Incidents such as these are really what expose the hypocrisy of victim-blaming that surrounds rape. In it, there is a perverse, prejudicial hierarchy that paints some women as more likely to be raped because of things they wear or do, as if being a victim of sexual violence were a privilege for the apparently desirable, beautiful or youthful. This form of thinking enshrouds the culpability of the rapist and hands him a leniency that often isn’t afforded to a victim.

Rape is a weapon, that is all. It is a tool used insidiously to overpower someone. There is no removing it from the historical, social and psychological context of it. And the history, society and psychology of it is telling in how alarmingly forgiving it is towards the criminal and how disgustingly forbidding it is towards the victim.

I want you to think about those women in Sudan. I want you to think about their pain and the people they were. How hopeless must they have felt?