On Wednesday October 28^th, Physicians for Human Rights convened a briefing on Capitol Hill to address sexual violence in Sudan and Chad. Physicians for Human Rights, a 1997 Nobel Peace Prize winning organization, mobilizes medical professionals to protect human rights. The organization partnered with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative to assess the level of human rights abuses against Darfuri women.

The organizations sent three physicians: Dr. Sondra Crosby, an Internist from the Boston University School of Medicine, Dr. Linda Piwowarczyk, a Psychiatrist and Director of the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights and Dr. Julia VanRooyen, a urogynecologic surgeon, along with a human rights researcher, to conduct interviews of eighty-eight women in the Farchana camp in eastern Chad. The camp was built to house 2,000 refugees but it now holds over 20,000 and has only one functioning latrine for all 20,000 inhabitants. Of the 88 women interviewed, twenty women had been raped and twelve had a high probability of having been raped. Seventeen of these rapes occurred in Darfur while fifteen occurred in Chad, demonstrating an almost equal number of rapes happening in Darfur and the supposed sanctuary of the refugee camp in Chad.

After seven teenage girls were publicly beaten until their arms were broken, within the confines of the camp, eight women of the camp decided to write a manifesto to express their frustration with their treatment. The Farchana Manifesto was published on June 10^th, 2008 with the women of the camp “[hoping] to achieve freedom for women in the whole world.”

In her efforts to compel us to understand the struggles of these women, Dr. Piwowarczyk pushed the audience to “imagine [that] you are one of these Darfuri women, whose hair has been cut off, who was stripped naked because you were raped”, to realize that these “women’s nightmares [were] not new” and had been happening since many of them were young.

The panel concluded that it is our moral obligation to end the rampant impunity surrounding violence against women because for the women in the Farchana camp “there is nothing post-traumatic, their suffering is palpable.”