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.”
“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”.
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