Society in Southern Sudan, Much Like All

¶ … Society in Southern Sudan, much like all of Sub-Saharan Africa (of which it is not technically considered a part), is substantially shaped by ancient tribal attitudes and beliefs about the respective roles and rights of the two genders. Generally, Sudanese women still endure gender inequality that prevents them from being socially or economically dependent and that exposes most of them to violence inflicted by men both inside and outside of the family. Domestic violence is prevalent largely because Sudanese men belief that it both their rights as men and perfectly appropriate to discipline their wives physically. Because education and professional training are the keys to social independence, the fact that opportunities in those areas are still largely unavailable to most Sudanese women is a significant barrier in that regard. Meanwhile, the empirical evidence demonstrates that once women manage to obtain quality education and professional training, they are readily capable of improving their positions in society and overcoming the principal barriers to their social empowerment. On one hand, large numbers of Sudanese women (and of African women more generally) are still victims of long-standing societal attitudes and cultural beliefs about the inferiority of women that perpetuates their continued subjugation by men. As a result, they still face political and economic oppression, forced arranged marriages, and domestic abuse, among other social injustices affecting women in African societies. On the other hand, the increasing influence of globalization in general and of both African-based and international human rights initiatives has begun a trend of improving the situation of Sudanese and other African women. To a great degree, those changes are more evident in the younger generations by virtue of their differential exposure to information technology and to the global cyber community. Despite the persistence of those inequalities, these changes suggest that there is reason to believe that future generations of Sudanese women will overcome these challenges with much greater success than their predecessors.