A woman swathed in black squares her shoulders and calmly looks into a camera. She holds a Quran. Only a sliver of her face—her eyeglasses—shows. “What happened to me hasn’t happened to anyone, or if it has affected anyone else I do not know,” she says. “But I will speak and let all the people know what [Syrian leader] Bashar al-Assad and his men are doing.” Over the next four minutes, her breathing grows labored and her voice breaks as she describes how, in May 2011, five men wearing black entered her home on the outskirts of Homs and raped her.

North Korea’s government has been enslaving citizens roughly 12 times longer than the Nazis held prisoners in concentration camps. Yet in most circles, the concentration camps run by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are far less talked about than the quirks and nuclear capacities of the regime. Due to a combination of distraction and difficult reporting, the systematic sexualized violence that occurs within those camps rarely garners attention.

The Women’s Media Center released a report that shines a light on the status of women in media. The Women’s Media Center 2012 Report on the Status of Women in US Media underscores the crucial need to hold media accountable for an equal voice and equal participation. Women’s Media Center co-founders, Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem hailed the report as a wake-up call for media makers and media consumers.

Sierra Leone’s civil war began in 1991, spanned 11 years, and left hundreds of thousands displaced and more than 50,000 dead. Yet the toll for women and girls was much higher than the war dead: Physicians for Human Rights estimates that during the conflict, between 215,000 and 257,000 of them were subjected to sexualized violence.

The Bangladesh War of 1971—in which up to 3 million people were killed, and hundreds of thousands of women raped—seemingly has its roots in strange cartography. As University of Chicago professor Rochona Majumdar puts it, the 1947 Partition between India and Pakistan was geographically “very weird,” with the nation of Pakistan split into two noncontiguous land masses.

Four women are raped every five minutes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to a study done in May 2011 by three researchers, including SUNY’s Tia Palermo. “These nationwide estimates of the incidence of rape are 26 times higher than the 15,000 conflict-related cases confirmed by the United Nations for the DRC in 2010,” says Palermo.

In February 2011, protests broke out in Benghazi, the second largest city in Libya, against the more than 40-year rule of Muammar Gaddafi. During the protests, security forces fired on civilian protesters, causing a broader uprising that led to the establishment of the National Transitional Council (NTC), an interim governing body in opposition to Gaddafi’s regime.

The Egyptian Revolution began on January 25, 2011, with millions of Egyptians demanding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. The revolution, while predominantly nonviolent compared to other Arab Spring protests, saw a number of violent clashes between security forces and protesters.

Despite Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war being declared over in May 2009, scholars continue to describe the post-conflict state of the country as “fragmented.”

In March 2003, after decades of tension, fighting erupted in Sudan’s western Darfur region between Sudanese government forces and rebel groups such as the Sudanese Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement. Over the next few months, tens of thousands of Darfuris fled. Government troops and allied militia forces, called the Janjaweed, attacked villages and internally displaced persons (IDP) camps, systematically raped women, and murdered whole communities.

The Rwandan genocide, which took the lives of an estimated 800,000 people, the majority of whom were Tutsis, erupted on April 6, 1994. Fueled by ethnic divisions between Hutus and Tutsis dating back to Belgium’s colonial rule, which began after the First World War, the killing was complete in just 100 days.