In Sudan today, the sound of war drowns out the laughter of children. Mothers carry their babies on their backs while fleeing burning villages, their faces etched with exhaustion, fear, and grief. Children clutch the hands of strangers because their parents have been lost to violence, hunger, or displacement. Behind every statistic of the war, there is a story of a woman forced to bury her loved ones or a child who has forgotten what it means to feel safe.
For Sudanese women and children, the choice is cruelly simple: stay and face starvation, rape, and death, or leave and risk the unknown. The road out of Sudan is not paved with hope, it is lined with desert graves, shattered dreams, and broken families. Some drown in the Mediterranean before ever reaching safety. Others vanish into the hands of traffickers who exploit their desperation. Those who survive carry invisible scars, mothers who endured sexual violence on the journey, children forced into early marriage, teenagers sold into labor instead of sitting in classrooms.
These journeys are not made out of courage, but out of despair. A mother does not risk her child’s life on a flimsy boat unless the land behind her has become unlivable. A child does not trade their schoolbooks for survival unless the world has denied them every other right.
The war has stripped Sudanese women and children of everything that anchors human dignity: the comfort of a safe home, the right to learn, the assurance of medical care, and the freedom to live without fear. Hospitals lie in ruins, schools stand empty, and food is so scarce that families sell their last possessions for a piece of bread.
The international community has watched, issued statements, and promised aid but for women and children in Sudan, promises do not stop bullets, nor do they fill empty stomachs.
What remains is silence, the silence of a world that looks away, and the silence of mass graves in the desert where the voices of Sudanese women and children have been forever stilled.
Yet even in this silence, there is resistance. A mother’s determination to keep her child alive is an act of defiance. A child’s dream of returning to school one day is a seed of hope. Their survival, against all odds, is proof that the world has not yet managed to extinguish their humanity.
15/ September/2025
Hanan Idries
Geneva