Godeliève Mukasarasi promised God that if her children survived the Rwandan genocide of 1994, she would perform charitable acts. They lived. Soon after, the then 35-year-old social worker and mother founded SEVOTA, or Solidarity for the Development of Widows and Orphans to Promote Self-sufficiency and Livelihoods, a support group for women in the small Rwandan village of Taba.

Little girls returning to school in Fallujah “have nothing to fear,” said Nahla al-Rawi as a few security officers dusted off a chair for her in the partially rehabilitated main hospital. Al-Rawi, 48, is a member of the Anbar provincial council, which is tasked with inspecting and overseeing public facilities such as schools and hospitals.

Six years after one of the worst single incidents of mass rape ever recorded in the 21st century, no perpetrator of the Walikale mass rapes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has ever been brought to trial in either a domestic or international forum. The attacks were condemned at the time by the United Nations Security Council, which urged swift prosecution. The hundreds of victims have never received any acknowledgment or reparation from the Congolese state.

To paraphrase one of Friedrich Nietzsche's most-cited sayings, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Rape and sexualized violence can kill, but those who survive it may emerge stronger. They need strength to testify against their perpetrators in court, strength to tell their husbands what happened, strength to carry on with their lives.

Much confusion swirls around when rape was actually recognized as a war crime. Try Googling “rape as a war crime” and you’ll find the third result is a Huffington Post article declaring that it was made such a crime definitively in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s initial case, in 1998. But this isn’t exactly right.

In May, a 16-year-old girl reported that she had been raped by at least 33 men armed with assault rifles and handguns in a favela, or slum, in the western part of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The girl said she believed she was drugged after she went to a party with her boyfriend on May 21. She woke up naked and wounded in a house, she said, surrounded by more than two-dozen men. The attack was so vicious it ruptured her bladder.

When the Democratic Republic of Congo was dubbed the “rape capital of the world” in 2010 by Margot Wallström, the former UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict, understandably the government of DRC was not happy. Besides that, putting one country above all others when it comes to violence against women is a debatable move: So many places have horrifying records of rape and impunity for such cases. But Wallström had good reason for aiming her words at what is unambiguously a truly terrible place for women.

When former radio host Jian Ghomeshi was acquitted of all charges in a high-profile trial in March, the Canadian judge wrote, “The evidence of each complainant suffered not just from inconsistencies and questionable behavior, but was tainted by outright deception.” He also suggested that willful deception was to blame rather than faulty memory, according to CNN.

Colonel Magistrate Freddy Mukendi is an imposing man who speaks from behind darkly shaded eyeglasses. He takes up the full space of a lounge chair, giving off a breezy, if formal, comfort in his own skin. Considering his high-level position in the DRC, this may not be entirely unexpected.

Today, as part of the UN Human Rights Council’s “Universal Periodic Review” process, Burma will be questioned by every country in the world on the nooks and crannies of human rights abuses happening inside its borders

In January 2008, during the violence following Kenya’s disputed elections, someone banged on my door. The man was a friend of my neighbor and, since my neighbor wasn’t home, I thought I might be able to help. But when I opened the door, he forced his way into my house and raped me.

It is clear there are accountability problems within the UN system when it comes to sexual assault. Between campaigns fighting for accountability in cases of rape in the Central African Republic by French peacekeepers and the latest scandal involving a UN contractor in the DRC, the issue of impunity for UN employees is now being discussed within the UN system—and outside of it, too.