By Ola Mohammed.
This article demonstrates the RSF’s strategic employment of online gender-based violence (OGBV) and Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV) as tools to assert dominance and escalate the war.
The war in Sudan, which erupted on April 15, 2023, between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), is a continuation of a disturbing pattern. Both sides have a long and documented history of using SGBV as a weapon of war, stretching back to the South Sudan War and the Darfur War in 2003. According to November 2024 data by UNHCR, the war caused 8 million internally displaced people (IDPs) and 2 million refugees in neighboring countries.
Due to restricted access to information, casualty figures vary significantly after a year into the war. This disparity in reported casualties is starkly illustrated by contrasting figures from various sources. While the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Initiative (ACLED) documented 18,000 deaths, the UNHCR estimated this number to be closer to 20,000 by October 2024. However, a study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine paints a far grimmer picture, estimating over 61,000 deaths in Khartoum alone. This study, which includes deaths from preventable diseases and starvation alongside conflict-related fatalities, suggests that the actual death toll across all regions is significantly higher than previously reported.
RSF: Built on Gold, Guns, and Brutality:
The RSF (formerly known as Janjaweed) was formed by Arab tribes in Darfur and empowered by the National Congress Party to fight African resistance and political movements in the region. RSF has a history of atrocities, including the destruction of Darfur, the ethnic cleansing of civilians, and the violent dispersal of the 2019 sit-in; this war is a continuation of their brutality. Women’s bodies have been systematically targeted, a blatant violation of international law and human rights. The RSF actions, particularly the suppression of dissent and the targeting of activists, directly contradict their claims of supporting democracy.
Since the 2000s, the issue of easy access to weapons in Darfur, coupled with the government’s failure to address land disputes, political marginalization, and past atrocities between farming communities (Non-Arab, including Masalit) and Arab herding communities, has perpetuated tensions in the region with the RSF focusing on recruiting from the Arab Rezigat tribe to combat the non-Arab. The RSF historically used child recruitment and continued this amid this war. A joint investigation report by Sudan Human Rights Hub and Ayin showcases in detail the RSF recruitment of boys under the age of 18 post-war with photos and video evidence.
Furthermore, Hemaidti’s path to power stems from multiple income streams; besides the private investment through 50 companies by 2021 owned by him and his brother, Hemaidti and the RSF were heavily engaged in Gun-for-hire operations like the Yemen War. Furthermore, Hemaditi was offered considerable resources, like the gold in Jabal Amer, by Al-Bashier during his era, allowing for Hemedti international trade in that sector.
The Dark Side of RSF’s Digital Footprint: Unmasking the War on Women
A global survey conducted in 2020 by the World Wide Web Foundation and the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts revealed that 52% of young women and girls had been subjected to a form of OGBV. Other reports also reach a consensus that women and girls who are active and speak up about different issues or are politically active receive stronger online violence, as seen during the 2018-2019 revolution period and subsequent events of the transitional period in Sudan.
Nearly two years into Sudan’s conflict, women are enduring a dual crisis. Trapped within a warzone marked by economic hardship and social upheaval while also simultaneously subjected to the brutal realities of sexual and online gender-based violence (SGBV-OGBV) perpetrated primarily by the RSF.
OGBV is a form of gender-based violence (GBV) that is committed, assisted, or aggravated by the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). OGBV is a relatively new phenomenon that has been increasing worldwide. It is an extension of the violence experienced by women in offline spaces, including both private and public spheres. However, Technology Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV) specifically refers to instances where technology facilitates or amplifies OGBV. This can include distributing private images without consent, creating deepfakes, or using social media to coordinate attacks. In essence, TFGBV is a subset of OGBV, highlighting the role of technology in enabling or aggravating these harmful acts.
Based on data from the Monitoring Online Gender-Based Violence project within the Hopes and Actions Foundation, both warring parties and their supporters have weaponized social media platforms to launch vicious attacks against women, using platforms like Facebook, X, and TikTok. However, the RSF has primarily been exploiting these platforms to spread hate speech and disinformation, throw accusations, and incite violence against civilians, particularly women, while silencing dissent through intimidation to make their narrative dominant online.
The RSF’s use of digital platforms to incite violence against citizens is evident in a video circulating online, where an RSF commander instructs soldiers on torture methods. He explicitly recommends using fire-filled containers to inflict suffering, claiming this method has been successfully used to obtain information leading to the capture and execution of targets. This disturbing footage offers a glimpse into the RSF’s disregard for human rights and the potential commission of war crimes.
While they resorted to killing journalists, they also utilized social media platforms to intimidate and threaten them, creating a hostile environment both online and offline. A recent video shows an RSF member indirectly threatening Rashan Oshi, Chief Editor of “Morning News,” for being pro-SAF.
RSF’s tenet is to provoke violence and destruction, which is demonstrated in many of its soldiers’ and supporters’ online photos and posts on digital platforms. A video of an RSF soldier saying that rape and looting are their rights as the country is theirs, while another RSF strong supporter, Issa Musa, posts on X how people from River Nile State are bastards and their women don’t need to be raped because they are already W*ores. In another case, a young female was assaulted by RSF soldiers while they looted her car in what seems to be another member filming, particularly showing the intentionality of filming such incidents to disseminate fear online. In another disturbing incident in Omdurman, RSF soldiers threatened the lives of men within a household, holding their mother at gunpoint and demanding car keys. This incident, along with other documented cases of RSF brutality, highlights the group’s disregard for human life and their escalating pattern of violence against civilians.
The RSF supporter Al-Rabie who claims to be a journalist and a political analyst with over 80K followers on TikTok, his videos are direct incitement to violence against women and to use rape as a weapon of War. The documentary “Sudan in the News” profiles Al-Rabie, who has made numerous online statements justifying the RSF’s use of sexual violence against women, particularly targeting Northern Sudanese women. This reflects the RSF’s internal belief in the existence of a “56th State,” a term they invented to express historical grievances against the Northern Sudanese who have dominated power over the country since its independence. This ideology has led to the RSF’s justification of their actions, including sexual violence, as a means to achieve their political goals. He also incites hate speech and terrorizes famous Sudanese singer Nadaa Al-Galaa for publicly supporting the SAF. Despite his clear and targeted harassment of women, his social media accounts remain active as of this writing, and he is even verified on X with over 40K followers.
Based on observations from a digital activist from Sudan, the RSF hate speech and violent videos were very intense at the beginning of the war, specifically on TikTok and Facebook, as opposed to currently, with a noticeable degree of freedom on X. This could be from the fact that they gathered many followers till now and wouldn’t want their pages to close due to the violations of platform rules, specifically TikTok, as they became more responsive to platforms violations compared to other platforms. Despite facing account closures on major platforms such as Facebook, X, and YouTube, the RSF has shifted its online activity primarily to Telegram.
The rampant dissemination of online videos depicting RSF soldiers inciting and perpetrating violence against women is not only horrifying but also deeply troubling. This alarming trend contributes to the cultural normalization of violence against women, a phenomenon rooted in societal attitudes that have historically condoned sexual violence. Social media platforms, unfortunately, have become complicit in this normalization by amplifying and disseminating these disturbing videos without adequate moderation or ethical considerations.
Escalating SGBV: A Wartime Misogyny Crisis
With the escalation of the war in the country and clashing events, especially (Khartoum tri-state area, Darfur region, and Al-Gazira state), are considered under the siege of the RSF. Many organizations reported an increase in sexual gender-based violence after the war erupted; IPPF mentioned a national rise in reporting of ethnic SGBV in Sudan; additionally, the UNFPA 16th situation report highlighted the alarming escalation of SGBV across Sudan, with a staggering 6.9 million are at risk.
According to UNHCR, SGBV refers to “any act that is perpetrated against a person’s will and is based on gender norms and unequal power relationships. It includes physical, emotional, psychological, and sexual violence and denial of resources or access to services. Violence includes threats of violence and coercion. SGBV inflicts harm on women, girls, men, and boys and is a severe violation of several human rights.”
Documenting the full extent of SGBV in Sudan is incredibly challenging due to limited access to survivors, ongoing conflict, and the sensitive nature of these crimes. The lack of data and accurate figures regarding the cases of violations against women is due to multiple factors; both SAF and RSF have damaged the telecom infrastructure, which reduces the likelihood of reaching and assisting victims/survivors and accurate reports on the numbers. Topping that with a network outage caused people to search for Starlink, which becomes an endangering factor for women and girls being harassed and looted by RSF on their way to locations where Starlink is available, as it is mainly under the hand of RSF members. Not to mention the stigmatization by society (UNFPA) and lack of interference from the state law and police to do anything for the victims, even pre-war. Additionally, the RSF’s relentless attacks on healthcare workers and infrastructure have crippled Sudan’s healthcare system. Hospitals, vital for treating survivors and documenting atrocities, have been particularly hard hit. In conflict zones, over 70% of hospitals are no longer operational due to damage and the constant threat of violence against medical personnel.
Despite these obstacles, organizations are striving to record and report these atrocities. For instance, since December 2023, 118 reports of SGBV have been reported to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. A recent report from September 2024 entailed that 216 SGBV cases have been reported since the beginning of the war to the Sudanese government’s Unit of Combating Violence Against Women and Children (CVAW) however, they have mentioned that this number doesn’t surpass 2% of the actual violence occurring. Lastly, the Fact-Finding Mission to Sudan’s October report estimated over 400 survivors of sexual violence till July 2024. As the RSF expands its control into new regions like Al-Gazira and Kordofan, the risk of SGBV against women intensifies. The RSF’s use of SGBV as both a military tactic and a tool of intimidation and control underscores the severity of the situation.
While historical instances of SGBV and OGBV often targeted women based on specific intersectional identities, the RSF’s current campaign of violence demonstrates a more indiscriminate approach, threatening women from diverse ethnic and political backgrounds, particularly in Khartoum. However, the RSF’s longstanding animosity towards African communities in Darfur and Kordofan has exacerbated the severity of violence against women in these regions, highlighting the continued role of historical grievances in shaping contemporary conflict dynamics. To illustrate, in West Darfur, the Masalit tribe in El Geneina has been a direct target of ethnic-based SGBV. RSF, with its allied Arab militia, has ethnically targeted Al-Massalit; also, several women were raped in Al-Genaina, emphasizing the RSF cursing them of their ethnic background. In South Darfur, specifically Nyala, women witnessed different types of SGBV, including abduction, forced prostitution, and sexual slavery by RSF soldiers.
RSF precedes its attacks on villages with online threats; for instance, after the RSF commander Kiekl defected from RSF to SAF at Al-Siriha village, RSF members threatened to destroy the village on videos on the X platform. In the wake of the RSF’s assault on Alsariha Village, OCHA reported from the Ministry of Health that the recent attacks occurred have led to an increase in violations against the citizens in the area, leading to 27 cases of SGBV on women and girls, some of them were only 6 years old.
The RSF’s strategic employment of SGBV and OGBV in Sudan constitutes a deliberate attempt to dismantle the country’s social fabric. This tactic, characterized by the systematic threat and execution of sexual violence against women and girls, including rape, kidnapping, and assault, often perpetrated in front of their male relatives, serves to not only inflict physical harm but also to deeply humiliate and degrade the victims and their families. This calculated brutality has created a vicious cycle of escalating the conflict zones. The pervasive fear generated by OGBV and SGBV has become one of the reasons men in various regions decided to arm themselves in self-defense, leading to an increase in civilian arms acquisition and a surge in individuals joining the military to protect their families and communities. This widespread civilian arming and the influx of new recruits into the conflict further exacerbate violence, creating a dangerous and unpredictable security environment for women.
Beyond Borders: OGBV’s Role in Regional Instability
The parallels between the use of OGBV in Sudan’s war and the Tigray War emphasize this issue’s global, but especially regional, nature. The Deutsche Welle released a documentary on the Tigray war and how ethnic hate speech and SGBV were spread online, impacting women’s lives.
Tigray women were targeted with rape and killing of their men. Facebook played a significant role in exacerbating the violence, as the documentary highlights. For instance, a survivor recounted being gang-raped by 15 soldiers, one of whom filmed the assault. These videos, along with others documenting various atrocities, were widely shared on social media platforms, especially Facebook, further dehumanizing victims and fueling the conflict. One survivor noted that “the actions of all parties involved were extensively circulated online.”
The role of META, the owner company of Facebook and Instagram, impacted the fueling of the war and violations. META content moderators are outsourced, with a lack of budget, having only 200 moderators for the entire African continent, and only five moderators were dedicated to the Tigray war to remove inciting content, not all of which were familiar with the language and war background to be able to identify hateful speech online. The Carnegie report stated that by 2020, 84% of the company’s efforts to combat misinformation were focused on the United States, with just 16% allocated to the rest of the world.
The Tigray and Sudan War exemplifies the fatal catastrophe occurring due to the role of social media, especially in the normalization of SGBV and TFGBV, in addition to the lack of social media platforms accountability that often delays the response of closing accounts or removing posts, and if they do, its usually after the damage is done.
III. Conclusion
The ongoing conflict in Sudan, fueled by the RSF’s systematic use of online gender-based violence (OGBV) and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), serves as a chilling echo of the atrocities committed in the Tigray region. A critical factor exacerbating this violence is the stark lack of content moderators in the Global South. This void allows hate speech, disinformation, and incitement to violence to flourish unchecked on social media platforms, further emboldening perpetrators and silencing victims.
A lack of content moderators in the Global South allows hate speech and disinformation to spread unchecked, further endangering women. Therefore, more advocacy is needed to push tech companies to localize moderators (language, context) to enhance the quality of the content online and remove inciting speech and misinformation by partnering with local initiatives that are working on creating safe online spaces.