Violence against women at Sudan’s universities has been 
In early January 2018, a video emerged and spread widely on Sudanese social media, appearing to show a vice-chancellor of Al-Ahfad University – a private women’s university in Omdurman, Sudan’s second largest city – physically assaulting female students.
The video appears to show Professor Gasim Bedri grabbing and slapping students who were reportedly protesting an increase in prices at the university’s canteen. University staff said it was filmed in 2013, according to Al Arabiya English, while students said this isn’t the only time that women have been assaulted at the school.
The incident has triggered broad debates around Al-Ahfad’s leadership, management, and claims to be leading on women’s rights in Sudan. One Twitter user said it was “excruciating” to witness a “bastion of strong gender equality principles, visibly broken” amid the “tyranny of evil men.”
At Sudan’s state universities, academic freedom and the quality of education has suffered gravely as faculty are pressured to reflect the current regime’s political Islamist ideologies. High-achieving students know that they have no chance of an academic post or scholarship unless they are part of the Islamist party.
Private universities have meanwhile mushroomed across the country without standards or rules to hold them accountable to academic, moral and scientific standards. Some of these have also thrived in recent years on spreading and promoting militant ideologies and the repression of women, including Africa University in Khartoum, which recruits students from across the continent.
