At the start of this year, my friend and WMC’s Women Under Siege director, Lauren Wolfe, started a Twitter hashtag, #2013EndRape, to highlight the epidemic of sexualized violence against women. While the hashtag has seen success, one of the unintended consequences has been its trolling and attacks on it by various “Men’s Rights Activists.”

When there’s not an acute famine in the Horn of Africa, the media tends to leave the misery in that part of the world unreported. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard much about Ethiopia specifically in awhile, minus a few international journalist friends mentioning that there is a migration problem for women who are seeking better lives in the Arab peninsula. As of this morning though, I can’t pretend to ignore what’s going on in the region any longer.

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.