Working within boundaries: Gender research in Sudan

Research is highly respected in Sudan. This gives researchers working on women’s rights a unique opportunity to influence Omar al-Bashir’s conservative government. But there are red lines even researchers cannot cross.

‘If you are in it for the short run, you will not achieve anything. We are in it for the long run’ Samia Nihar

You talk the talk, you walk the walk. Nowhere is this more clear than for researchers working on women’s rights in Sudan. In a country where the lines between research and activism are blurred, research on gender based violence equals women’s rights activism.

-Being a women’s rights activist is inseparable from my formal role as a researcher, says Samia Nihar, head of the Gender Unit at the Development Studies and Research Institute, University of Khartoum.

First and foremost a researcher, she is also an active member of several women’s rights organisations. She knows from experience that women’s rights activism in a conservative state is about seizing windows of opportunity and about the ability to compromise to be able to bring about social and legal change.

Seizing every window of opportunity
The space for civil society organisations is shrinking all over the world, and Sudan is no exception. Every national NGO has to be registered at the Humanitarian Aid Commission (HAC) whose task is to monitor and control civil society.

Gender based violence has been one of these red lines, but after the government launched a national strategy to combat violence against women in 2010 a unique window of opportunity has opened up for researchers working on violence against women. Nihar sees it as her responsibility to seize the opportunity.

Part of her work at the Gender Unit at the Development Studies and Research Institute consists of organising and facilitating training sessions on violence against women on a project funded by the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Khartoum. In these training sessions, the researchers bring together groups of women who normally operate in isolated isles: Government officials, hands-on policymakers, and activists. So far, they have organised nearly 40 training sessions all over the country.

-One of our most important contributions is to get people from different backgrounds talking. There are few arenas in which people can discuss women’s rights openly, says Nihar.  

Fighting the normalization of violence
The discussions that unfold during the training sessions confirm what Nihar and other women’s rights activists have known for a long time. The conversations about a taboo topic such as violence against women are sorely needed if one is to achieve legal and social change. Open debate on equal terms is the best tool to bring the women’s rights movement further. Fighting violence against women in Sudan is in many ways an uphill battle. For a long time, the top-level politicians in Khartoum denied the mere existence of such an abhorrence. On the countryside, the challenge was a completely different, yet equally hard to deal with.

-In many communities, beating your wife or your sister is perfectly acceptable. It is not considered to be violence, says Nihar.

The training sessions are led by skilled facilitators from the Gender Unit at the Development Studies and Research Institute, and make use of research on violence against women from renowned and experienced researchers in the field, amongst them Liv Tønnessen, research director at CMI, and independent researcher Samia El Nager. The sessions raise awareness on what violence against women really is in a context where far too many women and young girls are still subject to a wide range of abuses, from female genital mutilation to domestic violence, and encourages the participants to reflect on the issue and share their experiences. The researchers facilitating the training sessions know that they cannot push, but merely facilitate the discussions. Their most important skill is patience.

-Because violence against women is such a contested issue, it takes time to get participants to open up. But as we go, something happens. They start talking, sharing their own experiences or recounting incidents from their own community, says Nihar.

Raising critique
Gender equality is a controversial topic in Sudan, and there are still many red lines you cannot overstep in the fight for women’s equal rights. Yet, women’s right activists are putting sensitive topics on the agenda, including child marriage, sexual violence, and marital rape.   

Sudan is now in the process of trying to improve its human rights record. This has opened up a new space for women to advocate for change. After Sudan presented its Universal periodic report to the UN last year, a clear recommendation was to put a minimum age of marriage at 18 (the current family law sets the minimum age of marriage at 10 years). The National Council for Child Welfare is currently drafting a national strategy to put an end to child marriage, and women both inside and outside of government now work on child marriage. But even women working from within the government face challenges from religious conservatives claiming child marriage is Islamic. Yet, there are pockets of change even from within.

And despite challenging circumstances, Samia Nihar is an unyielding optimist.

-If you are in it for the short run, you will not achieve anything. We are in it for the long run. Little by little, attitudes, behaviour and perceptions are changing, she says.