Prevention of Sexual Violence in Conflict

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

As ever, it is a pleasure to serve with you as our Chair, Sir Charles. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) for bringing forward this important debate. She made an absolutely excellent contribution, and it has been a good debate.

As we have heard, horrific sexual violence continues to be used as a weapon of war in conflicts around the world. Across the House, we are absolutely united in our opposition to that practice, no matter where it occurs and who the perpetrators are. I am therefore grateful to my hon. Friend for creating time for us to talk not just about this utter horror and the damage it does, but about how we can play our part in supporting solutions.

I hope hon. Members will forgive me if I focus on a few of the African contexts where we continue to see sexual violence used as a weapon on a truly appalling scale. I will start with the ongoing generals’ war against the people of Sudan—against the women and the girls of Sudan. There have been 5,000 reports of grave violations in Sudan, including sexual violence, but that is likely to be an underestimate, given that 60,000 survivors of sexual violence in conflict have been identified in Sudan as of June 2023, which is almost a year ago.

Sexual violence by armed men has been reported in areas across Sudan, with many different groups targeted. In Khartoum, Sudanese women, girls and whole families have been raped in their homes and in the street. In Darfur, targeted sexual violence against the Masalit people and other non-Arab Darfuris has formed a major component of the ethnic cleansing campaigns. The link between racism, misogyny and the political agenda of some armed groups in Darfur has been evidenced again and again. Women who are attacked are labelled “slaves”, using racist slurs. I would just like to quote from an Al-Jazeera report that sums up the utterly chilling mentality of these rapists:

“After [we] rape [you], you will carry our babies […] to change the non-Arab portion within the Sudanese blood”.

These patterns of targeted violence against women and girls in Khartoum and Darfur are mostly attributed to the Rapid Support Forces or their allied forces. The UN reported in February that one victim was held by the RSF and gang-raped repeatedly for 35 days. The sheer horror of it! As a woman, I honestly cannot comprehend how one might survive that. There are also continued reports of sexual violence being used to intimidate women’s rights activists, and that is often attributed to the Sudanese armed forces.

The healthcare system has almost entirely collapsed. Few of the women victimised through rape can access the immediate support needed to deal with physical and mental trauma, the risks of infection or the risks of pregnancy. The UN has reported that women who have tried to access abortion have been denied it because Sudan’s 90-day legal window to obtain an abortion in the case of rape had passed. We must continue to work together against the stigmatisation of children born following rape and to argue for universally accessible abortion for all women who face these terrible circumstances.

We need to redouble our efforts to stop the generals’ war in Sudan and to support forces for sustainable peace and justice, because right now in Darfur hundreds of thousands remain trapped in the city of El Fasher, under siege, in famine conditions and with the imminent threat of attack by the RSF. This is already an atrocity. How many more women and children will be targeted for rape and violence if El Fasher falls? The international community must surely act now to protect the civilians trapped in that city, and I hope the Minister will be able to say something about the Government’s plans for action and what immediate further steps the UK might take.

Sadly, the horrors I have described in Sudan are familiar from other recent and continued conflicts, as we have heard. I have spoken many times about the large-scale and often ethnically targeted sexual violence that was evidenced in Ethiopia during the Tigray war. UN experts have estimated that this conflict has left 10,000 survivors of sexual violence, mostly women and girls, with very limited support. If he is able to, will the Minister therefore update us on the Government’s engagement with Ethiopia over the process of accountability for these abuses? Sadly, the threat is far from over, because conflicts between ethnically organised armed groups continue in many areas of Ethiopia, including Amhara, Tigray, Haramaya and the south-west.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) mentioned in his contribution, the threat to women and girls is even greater in the Democratic Republic of Congo, particularly among the hundreds of thousands of civilians forcibly displaced by the M23’s advance—that is the M23 for which there is credible evidence of material Rwandan support.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I am pleased that the hon. Lady mentioned that issue. The reality is that 7 million people in the Congo have been displaced. The world’s media barely recognise that—it barely registers on their scale—but it is probably the greatest abuse of human rights anywhere in the world at present.

[Ms Brown]

I understand where the right hon. Gentleman is coming from and I utterly agree.

Let me quote the heartbreaking words of a 15-year-old girl called Florence:

“One of them took me by force, strangled me, and”

they

“raped me one after another. He had strangled me so much that I no longer had the strength to scream.”

The rape survivors supported by Save the Children in the DRC are as young as nine years old. The impact on children, women, families and communities is enormous. We cannot be content with just raising our voices repeatedly against these atrocities; we need a clear strategy for how the UK can play its part. For me, preventing sexual violence must be integral to the wider approach to conflicts and violence.

These horrific cases, whether in Sudan, Ethiopia or the DRC, do not end at those countries’ borders; they spill over into the wider region and undermine security for many communities. To truly prevent that, we have to recognise how it works politically. The perpetrators are individual men—soldiers, commanders and politicians —but their violence can take hold only because the state fails to stop it. Ultimately, this will stop only when there are robust state institutions, justice systems to hold people to account, and security forces that protect communities, rather than bearing responsibility themselves for the violations.

In contexts such as Sudan, there are no trustworthy state authorities that play that part, so we have to be smarter in the way we act. We have to look beyond the easy options of international NGOs and expensive consultants and to be far more open to working directly with small local organisations. In Sudan, there are many women’s groups and other local organisations that are opposed to both military factions. They are a force for peace, democracy and justice, and at the same time they provide support to survivors of rape in their own communities. My main question to the Government today is, why are we not doing more to support them? Why are we not supporting the Sudanese women who challenge the power of the generals—the men who have plunged the country into this nightmare and put millions of sisters in such dire risk? Why do we not recognise that building the capacity of local organisations is a strategic intervention in the UK’s interests?

We cannot see this issue in terms of silos. It is a humanitarian and medical response. It is development. It is accountability and justice. It is diplomacy and sanctions. It is peacebuilding. It is all those things. Let’s face it, our resources are limited and the challenges in regions such as the horn of Africa are massively complex and interconnected. It is more important to break down the barriers and recognise that, unless our interventions help to solve many challenges simultaneously, they will not be effective. They will not support our efforts to build strong partnerships for mutual benefit in Africa, and they will not genuinely help to prevent this horrific form of abuse, which continues to blight our world.