Sudan’s War is Forcing Families to Rethink FGM. We Cannot Waste This Moment.

“I am now 53 years old, and its effects are still with me.”

This searing testimony from a Sudanese grandmother in Cairo is one of many included in a study published last month by my colleagues at Equality Now and Tadwein for Gender Studies. This study reveals the intimate, often invisible fissures female genital mutilation leaves across generations, borders, and belief systems.

The United Nations estimates that over four million people have fled Sudan since the country’s devastating civil war began in 2023, and around 10.5 million are internally displaced. The majority are women and children, with many facing compounded risks not only from the violence of conflict, but disruption of social protections, and erosion of healthcare systems. A vital question remains: What happens to FGM when displaced families return to Sudan? 

In Sudan, FGM has historically been carried out by elder women and traditional midwives as a way of enforcing social norms around purity and marriageability. With the collapse of state institutions, there is a real risk of resurgence, with families feeling pressured to return to tradition as a source of stability. This is why shifting people’s views now is critical: it is the only way to ensure that when girls return home, they are not reabsorbed into communities where FGM is still seen as inevitable.

While crises can fuel harmful practices, they can also create the space to challenge them, offering the potential to alter the trajectory of one of the most pervasive human rights violations still being inflicted upon millions of girls. In Sudan alone, an estimated 87 percent of women and nearly one in three girls under 15 have undergone FGM, placing the country among those with the highest prevalence worldwide, and contributing to the staggering global total of more than 230 million survivors.

Shaking the Foundation of FGM

In the Greater Cairo area, our research found that displacement has shifted priorities away from the harmful tradition to the daily struggle of accessing food, housing, healthcare, and education.  Elderly women, historically the most powerful enforcers of the FGM practice, have recently softened their stance. Remarkably, many now lead the opposition.

“If they practiced it in Sudan and were not convinced to abandon it, they will practice it in Egypt...” one mother with a university education told Equality Now and Tadwein.

For many of the 30 participants, who took part in the study throughout 2024, FGM has been unmasked not as a required rite of passage but as an unnecessary wound shrouded in myths of purity and obedience. Their change in perspective was often triggered by access to education, exposure to alternative narratives of womanhood, and, for some, the painful lived realities of childbirth and sexual relationships. Husbands, too, spoke of the damage FGM has caused to their marriages, undermining trust and intimacy.

Further, our study revealed that many Sudanese are being outspoken about how their rights should not be suspended in war, only to be reintegrated again. Sudan’s protracted war has shattered the country’s healthcare infrastructure and reversed decades of gender progress. Before the war, Sudan criminalized FGM in 2020, expanded space for women’s rights activism during the transitional period, and advanced community initiatives like the Saleema Inititative. A 2020 amendment to the Criminal Act criminalized the practice at the national level, but enforcement remains elusive. In conflict zones, where formal justice systems have collapsed, traditional structures often fill the void, and it is within these informal spaces that FGM has historically thrived. There is a real risk that when women and families return, old norms will be waiting for them. Without access to culturally relevant, survivor-centered support and community dialogue, many may feel the pressure to conform. This could mean a resurgence of FGM among those who, in exile, had begun to challenge it.

Many Sudanese refugees in Cairo are now surfacing truths that were long silenced in Sudan: that FGM is not religious, not necessary, and not benign. It damages not only bodies but also families. It corrodes trust and autonomy. And that change is possible, even if it comes late.

The Way Forward

So what should be done? First, any reintegration planning for Sudanese returnees must explicitly address FGM. This includes protection mechanisms for girls, such as community-based child protection committees, safe spaces for adolescent girls, and legal aid or hotline services to report threats, alongside psychosocial support for survivors, and targeted outreach to community influencers, especially older women, who are poised to shift norms from within.

Second, regional bodies, including the African Union (AU), the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the League of Arab States (LAS), and donors, must ensure anti-FGM initiatives are not siloed or paused during conflict or post-conflict response. FGM should be treated with the same urgency as other forms of gender-based violence. Emergency response strategies must include culturally sensitive education campaigns, community dialogue, and accountability mechanisms, even in humanitarian settings.

Third, support must be directed toward Sudanese-led, feminist civil society organisations operating in exile and within Sudan. Groups such as SIHA Network and the Sudanese Feminist Movement (Harakat al-Nisā’ al-Sūdāniyāt), which continue to document violations, provide survivor support, and campaign against FGM across refugee communities, exemplify the critical role Sudanese feminists play in bridging resistance abroad and reform at home. Often underfunded and under threat, these groups are uniquely positioned to speak across generations and contexts.

Finally, we must dismantle the myth of “milder” forms of FGM. Whether it is called “Sunna” or sanitized through medicalization, every form of FGM is a violation. The idea that harm can be justified through lesser pain is a dangerous fiction that enables the practice to persist, hidden behind language.

The voices in Equality Now and Tadwein’s report are courageous. They remind us that no policy, law, or border can replace the power of lived truth. And they compel us to ask: What kind of legacy will we choose for the next generation of Sudanese girls? 

Will we allow war and displacement to pause progress? Or will we recognize this rupture as a rare chance to rewrite the story of girlhood and womanhood for Sudanese communities everywhere?

The women in this report have answered. Now it is up to us to listen and act.