The Duchess of Edinburgh was moved to tears after meeting refugees who fled to Chad to escape the civil war in neighbouring Sudan.
Sophie hugged five women who had suffered sexual violence related to the conflict which broke out in April 2023, and later admitted she was “quite wobbly” after hearing their “devastating” experiences.
The duchess was the first member of the Royal Family to make an official visit to Chad.
She spent three days in the central African country, including one at the border with Sudan.
The 59-year-old 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.”
During her trip, the duchess went to Adre, where more than 220,000 refugees, mostly women and children, are living in a camp after fleeing the conflict between the Sudanese armed forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Sophie, who was accompanied by representatives from the UNICEF charity, visited the border crossing with Chad, where between 400 and 1,000 people cross daily.
Among those she met were two women who had crossed into Chad after travelling around 30 miles with their children, including a baby and a toddler.
The duchess also spoke 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 she had not seen him since fighting broke out.
Read more:
Eyewitness: ‘Give me your daughter or we’ll take her’
Massacre on the streets of Sudan
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Bodies piled up ‘like a wall’ – witness
One of the women Sophie met said afterwards she had fled the city of Geneina, in the west Darfur region of Sudan, after thousands of people were killed over several 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 the men who were rounded up and taken away.
She described seeing bodies piled up in the street “like a wall”.
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The duchess, who arrived in Chad on Saturday and left on Monday, 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).
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Earlier this year Sophie, who has two children – Lady Louise Windsor, 20, and 16-year-old James, the Earl of Wessex – with her husband the Duke of Edinburgh, became the first royal to visit Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion.
There she met President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and First Lady Olena Zelenska to discuss how to support survivors of conflict-related sexual violence.
