The Duchess of Edinburgh was moved to tears after she met refugees fleeing to Chad to escape the civil war in Sudan and heard their “devastating” experiences of sexual violence.
Sophie became the first member of the royal family to make an official visit to the central African country when she spent three days there, including one at the border with Sudan, before leaving on Monday afternoon.
At a hospital centre in Adre, near the border, the duchess hugged five survivors of conflict-related sexual violence after hearing what they had been through.
Sophie, 59, was in tears as she spoke to the media following the private meeting.
She said: “People are having to exchange food and water for sex, for rape. That is violence that is being enacted through conflict. It is being used as a bargaining tool.
“These women have no option but to leave. And, even then, they’re lucky if some of them can get away because some of the villages and towns that they come from they can’t even leave their houses any more. If they leave their houses they get killed.”
She added: “What they do to the children is… I can’t even use the words.”
The duchess, who has two children, Lady Louise Windsor, 20, and 16-year-old James – the Earl of Wessex with her husband the Duke of Edinburgh, Edward, admitted she was “quite wobbly” after hearing the women’s experiences, which she described as “devastating”.
One of the women who Sophie met said afterwards she had fled the city of Geneina, in the west Darfur region of Sudan, after thousands of people were killed in a matter of days.
The woman said her family had been threatened with death and rape if they left their home, while her teenage son and brothers were among men who were rounded up and taken away.
She described seeing bodies piled up in the street “like a wall”.
After arriving in Chad’s capital city N’Djamena on Saturday, Sophie took an early morning flight on Sunday to Farchana on the other side of the country.
A motorcade with a military escort then took her a further hour and a half’s drive, over rough terrain, to Adre, where more than 220,000 refugees, mostly women and children, are living in a camp after fleeing following the conflict between the Sudanese armed forces (SAF) and the paramilitary RSF which broke out in April 2023.
Sophie, accompanied by representatives from charity Unicef, visited the border crossing, where she heard between 400 and 1,000 people cross daily.
One group was greeted by the royal after arriving from Sudan on a horse and cart.
With the help of interpreters, the duchess spoke to the two women, who had travelled 50-60km with their children, including a baby and a toddler, and asked if they knew they would be given food and shelter after crossing into Chad.
On a visit to the registration centre at the border, she knelt down to speak to a mother-of-five, who had a small child lying on her lap and a baby strapped to her back, who told her she had travelled for 10 days before arriving.
The woman, like many of the refugees, did not know where her husband was and had not seen him since fighting broke out.
From the border, the duchess visited an integrated services centre to see the work of different organisations who support women and children in the camp.
After her emotional meeting with the sexual violence survivors, Sophie visited a session run by Plan International, which runs mobile protection units to try to identify children in the camps who need help.
Fatima Abaulgasim, 15, and 13-year-old Mayada Abdoulgadir Oumar, both refugees from Sudan, were among children who took part in the session.
Speaking through an interpreter from Plan International, Fatima said: “We are here but our situation is still awful. We need support for education and support for healthcare.”
Mayada added: “Education here is zero, we need education.”
The duchess is a champion of the UN’s Women, Peace and Security Agenda (WPS) and a supporter of the UK’s Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative (PSVI).
Earlier this year she became the first royal to visit Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion, where she met President Volodymyr Zelensky and First Lady Olena Zelenska to discuss how to support survivors of conflict-related sexual violence.