No one wants to go to war. Before we commit soldiers and societies to inevitable sacrifice and atrocities, we try to balance the inevitable harm against the potential good. We seek to make the wars we undertake “just” by applying defined criteria to a scale of moral weights and principled measures. Men are tortured and die, women are raped and murdered, children suffer and starve.

Safa Sankari, a member of our Syria team, spoke at the UN on July 18 as part of a presentation of our first findings of a data analysis of our crowdmap of sexualized violence in Syria. Sankari, who is Syrian-American, is the co-founder and president of the Syrian American Medical Society’s Michigan Chapter Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps in the humanitarian and medical needs of Syrians. WMC’s Women Under Siege Director Lauren Wolfe also spoke. You can read her testimony here.