Campaigners are calling for urgent action to tackle a rise in “honour killings” in Sudan.
Eleven women and girls have been killed by relatives so far this year, more than double the number reported to the authorities in 2021.
In September an 18-year-old woman, Aisha Abakar , died after an attack led by family members who believed the unmarried Darfur teenager was pregnant. Her younger sister is in a critical condition in hospital after being injured in the same attack. Three men have been arrested. Three days previously, in the same state a 21-year-old woman was murdered by her brothers and cousins who believed that she was talking to men on her mobile phone. No arrests have been made for her murder.
Nahla Yousif, head of the Future Development Organisation, a women’s rights group based in South Darfur state, said the reported cases were the “tip of the iceberg”.
“I believe there are so many other similar crimes in the villages and towns that are far from the media. We only get to hear about those which are taken to the police,” she said. “It’s all about ignorance and lack of awareness, they think it’s shameful to see their daughters having relationships. These crimes have always been here, but they are now increasing due to the lack of accountability.”
Yousif said the rise of the use of mobile phones meant more men were unable to feel in control of young female relatives.
“Even the young women who are activists working in important fields documenting the abuses people go through in the [displacement] camps are now targeted by their relatives,” she said. “We have had to offer shelter to some women because they had smartphones and their relatives assumed they would be chatting with men.”
The majority of reported cases this year have occurred in Darfur, where for decades violence and rape against women has been used as a weapon of war by the Janjaweed militias. Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who founded the Janjaweed and is head of the feared Rapid Support Forces, is now vice-president of Sudan’s governing sovereign council.
Yousif said her organisation was planning protests to raise awareness of the violence and was writing to the Darfur Bar Association to urge lawyers to push for cases to go to court, and not be quietly settled with families.
Sulaima Ishaq, head of the unit to stop violence against women in the Ministry of Social Affairs, said the coup in October last year had disrupted government institutions.
“There is no system in place, nothing is functioning, the judicial system is not working,” she said. “They [the government] are too busy releasing those who killed the martyrs during the revolution, despite saying that they did the coup for the safety and the security of the people of Sudan.”
Research conducted by the Arab Barometer in 2019 showed that more than a quarter of people over the age of 35 in Sudan thought that “honour killings” were acceptable.
Women’s groups fear rights are under threat in Sudan after, in July, a Sudanese woman was given the first sentence of death by stoning for adultery for a decade and where in Augustthe government announced a new police unit which suggested a return of the “morality police”, who punished “immoral” behaviour under former president Omar al-Bashir.
