For the first time in the history of the Bosnian War Crimes Court, judges included compensation to a wartime rape victim as part of the court’s ruling. On June 24, 2015, Bosiljko Marković and Ostoja Marković were ordered to pay roughly $15,000 to the woman they raped during the war. The court sentenced each man to ten years in prison.

We began 2015 by looking at underreported stories of rape and sexualized violence around the world. Cases involving sexualized violence against women—its aftermath, its consequences—were falling below the public’s radar. Now, six months in, we thought we’d take a look at some of the good things that have happened—the steps forward in the march to end sexualized violence globally.

In India, it is legal to rape your wife. And as of last month, when a government minister explained why he thought the issue can’t be remedied in his country, marital rape is back in the news.

In 2011, a Thomson Reuters poll found that Somalia was ranked among the top five most dangerous countries to be a woman. Fewer than three years later, Human Rights Watch concluded that two decades of civil conflict in the country had created a large population of civilians vulnerable to sexualized violence, in a report titled “Here, Rape is Normal.”

The conflict in eastern Ukraine, now in its 10th month, has taken a heavy toll on the country’s population. Wide-ranging violations of international humanitarian law have been documented on both sides of the conflict, following clashes between Russian-backed rebels and the Ukrainian government forces in the eastern regions of the country.

Bimbatta Niamey, a poised and soft-spoken woman from West Africa’s Burkina Faso, was suddenly stripped of all her stability and left to rebuild her life alone in December 2012, when her husband died of liver complications. The family of her husband, who was a chauffeur, immediately withdrew her entire savings while she cared for him.