According to the United Nations, over 200 million people around the world desperately need humanitarian aid. Across the globe—from Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Africa, to Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon in the Middle East, to Ukraine in Eastern Europe, and Myanmar in Southeast Asia, among a host of other places—currently face mass violence, civil war, or genocide. These conflicts disproportionately target women and girls through both direct and indirect measures, leaving millions of women around the world in violent, abusive, and often deadly conditions.
Sudan currently faces the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. In April 2023, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the UAE-funded Rapid Support Forces (RSF) rebel group threw the nation into civil war, plunging Sudan further into a decades-long humanitarian crisis. The U.S. Department of State and multiple international governing bodies have officially declared the conflict a genocide due to the RSF’s deliberate ethnic cleansing of Sudan’s non-Arab communties. After three brutal years, over 12 million Sudanese are internally displaced and an estimated 33 million—nearly two-thirds of Sudan’s population—need humanitarian support, according to the International Rescue Committee.
Sudanese women and girls bear the brunt of the conflict. The UN estimates that over half of the 12 million displaced in Sudan are female, and sexual violence against women runs rampant. A new report by medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières calls rape a defining feature of the conflict, with the vast majority of reported perpetrators hailing from the RSF. While cases of sexual violence in Sudan are severely unreported due to the inadequacy of organized healthcare and law enforcement, the UN reports that the country saw a 288% increase in demand for services specifically combatting gender-based violence by 2024, less than a year after the war officially started.
Over 3,000 personal testimonies in the recently published MSF report reveal the alarming and ongoing prevalence of sexual abuse against female civilians in Sudan’s civil war. The reported attacks often involved multiple rapists at a time, and mostly occurred as victims attempted to flee Darfur, a large region in Western Sudan where a substantial amount of the crisis is concentrated.
One anonymous woman in the MSF report stated, “two of the women in our group were raped by RSF militia in front of us. It was four to five men doing it together. One girl was 22 years old and she died there.” Another reported, “Apart from the rapes, they beat us with sticks and pointed guns at my head. Another girl who was 15 […] was raped by three men. We were raped throughout the night.”
Sexual violence in Sudan remains even after active military zones and front lines shift. South Darfur, for example, is not currently an active warfare zone, yet a concerning number of reported incidents trace back to the region. Sexual abuse against women has become ingrained in Sudanese daily life, and aid efforts by international bodies like the UN, IRC, and MSF to combat gender-based violence still face immense challenges, even after almost three years of extraordinary suffering.
Up the Suez Canal and into the Middle East, another humanitarian crisis targets female civilians—specifically the approximately one million Palestinian women and girls who currently live in the decimated Gaza strip.
After the attacks of October 7th—attacks including sexual violence against Israeli women by Hamas operatives—Israel has unleashed a retaliatory bombardment on Gaza and its people. According to the British Red Cross, the Israeli armed forces have killed over 69,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including over 17,000 children, and injured over 170,000 others since October 2023. These numbers are likely underestimated due to the collapse of Gaza’s organized healthcare ministry, bodies that remain unaccounted for under rubble, and deaths due to disease or malnutrition rather than direct trauma. On August 22, 2025, a UN-backed IPC report officially declared a famine in the Gaza Governorate, a northern region of the Gaza Strip, with a high risk of immediate expansion southward into the regions Deir el-Balah, Khan Yunis, and Rafah.
The UN reported that women and girls accounted for an estimated 67 percent of reported casualties in the Gaza strip—casualties due to a combination of Israeli air strikes, IDF attacks on civilians at humanitarian aid shelters, famine, disease, and internal violence. Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system and their blockade of medical supplies render women disproportionately vulnerable; thousands of pregnant and lactating women lack access to necessary care, while hundreds of thousands lack sanitary menstrual supplies.
Israel’s direct blockade of food and baby formula into Gaza over the past two years has also resulted in a drastic increase in miscarriages and pregnancy complications for Palestinian women. Fuel shortages due to the blockade put infants in need of medical equipment like incubators at risk as well.
In July 2025, Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, described direct sexual violence—violence reminiscent of that of Sudan—directed at the women of Gaza. She reported on assaults committed by Israeli forces on Palestinian women and girls as well as intimate partner violence within communities.
A ceasefire agreement was reached in October 2025, where Israel allowed for an increased flow of humanitarian aid into the Gaza strip in return for the release of the remaining hostages. However, the estimated 1.9 million displaced Gazans still need significantly more humanitarian aid. Additionally, the healthcare infrastructure of Gaza remains in desperate need of further aid and permanent health services for Palestinians, especially women and girls.
Back in Africa, about 2000 kilometers south of Sudan, the women of the Democratic Republic of the Congo face a decades-long crisis that has continued to worsen over the past few years. Decades of armed conflict in the DRC has culminated in the country bearing a classification of 186th out of 187 countries on the UN’s Human Development Index, and over 70% of the population live below the poverty line.
Since 1996, conflict in the DRC has led to an estimated six million civilian deaths. The First Congo War (1996-1997) began in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, as millions of refugees fled Rwanda and crossed the eastern Congolese border, leading to conflict between Hutu extremist organisations (the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide) and rising Tutsi organisations in the Congo. Over the past three decades, various resurgences and mutations of the violence have arisen between a multitude of different groups, now manifest in the conflict between M23, a Tutsi rebel alliance, and Hutu militias. Illicit foreign exploitation—largely by regional backers like Rwanda—of the DRC’s vast reserves of natural resources like cobalt, oil, and lithium, among others—minerals used for products like smartphones, laptops, and electric car batteries—fuel the perpetual violence in the Congo.
The UN estimates that along with the civilian death toll of over six million, at least one million Congolese women are victims of rape and sexual assault. UN Women reports that up to 52% of women in DRC are survivors of domestic violence and 39% of Congolese women report being threatened or injured. Forced marriage of young girls is also a widespread practice, with reports indicating 39% of women in their early twenties were married or in a union before the age of 18. As in Sudan, sexual assault is also used as a military tactic against civilian Congolese women.
While violence against women in Sudan, Gaza, and the Congo are three relatively known humanitarian crises, gender-based violence exists all around the world, both conspicuously and inconspicously—from the war-torn world of Myanmar, to immigrant camps in Northern Syria and Rojava, to the lives of millions of women in Central and South America. Looking forward, an emphasis on gender-specific humanitarian aid and permanent peace negotiations, and the collective dismantling of oppressive, exploitative systems are urgently necessary to combat the suffering of women and girls across the globe. Gender-based violence thrives on anarchy; when conflicts spiral into disorder, violence against women festers. Beyond providing temporary relief for women and girls, we must collectively establish global aid and support systems—what international organizations like the UN or MSF continue to work towards—to prevent gender-based violence in times of chaos.
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