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Colombia For over five decades, Colombia has faced an internal armed conflict affecting more than 9 million people. Guerrillas, paramilitaries, drug cartels, and State forces have been involved in a contest for the control of territory, with severe consequences for civilians. People have suffered conflict related sexual violence, enforced disappearances, killings, and internal displacement. Conflict-related […]

Nigeria Since 2014, Boko Haram has employed sexual violence as a weapon of war and used the kidnapping of young schoolgirls to propagate their extremist anti-western education rhetoric. Many were abducted from schools, their homes, from farms and markets, and other public places. In captivity they were subjected to rape, forced marriages, forced pregnancies, sexual […]

Democratic Republic of the Congo The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has seen systematic rape and other forms of sexual violence committed on a massive scale for decades. Estimates vary, but somewhere between 250,000 and one million women have been raped since the beginning of the armed conflicts in the 1990s. Only a small […]

Central African Republic Since 2002, the Central African Republic (CAR) has endured some form of armed conflict, with sexual violence used indiscriminately by all parties. Most of its victims have never seen justice, nor obtained much needed care and acknowledgment for what they suffered. Our work in CAR started in 2021, when research for our […]

Guinea On 28 September 2009, a peaceful demonstration against the military junta at a sports stadium in Conakry was violently repressed by security forces. Many people were subjected to sexual violence. In September 2022, the trial related to the atrocities began in Guinea. Two years later, a landmark judgment was delivered: former government officials, including […]

Syria The Assad regime, ousted in December 2024, left behind a long and brutal legacy of forced disappearances, torture, killings, and other atrocities spanning over more than five decades. Hundreds of thousands of people were held in prisons and secret detention sites across the country, where sexual violence was used as a tool to intimidate detainees and […]

Cambodia Conflict-related sexual violence during the Khmer Rouge regime remains largely invisible and unacknowledged. Forced marriages were prevalent, imposed as a demographic control mechanism, and many survivors continue to live with the aftermath. Other forms of sexual violence, such as rape and sexualised torture, were also rampant but even less discussed. The Extraordinary Chambers in […]

Nepal From 1996 until 2006, thousands of people were subjected to conflict-related sexual violence in a civil war between the armed forces and rebel groups who later became the Communist Party of Nepal. Women belonging to indigenous groups, so-called lower castes and impoverished communities were particularly targeted and subjected to severe moral, physical, and psychological […]

Since war broke out in Sudan in 2023, close to 740,000 people, mostly women and children, have sought refuge in neighbouring Chad. Sexual violence has been used as a weapon of war by all parties to the conflict. In 2024, GSF was to Chad invited by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to share expertise on our […]

Côte d’Ivoire Côte d’Ivoire has experienced a series of violent conflicts since 2002, leading to rampant human rights abuses and sexual violence committed by all parties. In the early days, conflict-related sexual violence was used to punish and humiliate political enemies and became more widespread during an armed rebellion. This continued until the end of […]