I spent much of June in Turkey, ostensibly. But in the south, at the Syrian border, where Arabic is the language of choice, women wear traditional Syrian hijabs, and families live in the strange half-life of an open-ended nightmare of exile, I was, in some ways, in Syria.

Almost every day, readers write to tell us that women will always be targeted in conflict. Rape, they say, is just a natural part of war, and there’s no way to stop it. Yet research shows that this isn’t actually the case.