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.

The woman looked uneasy and uncomfortable as she peered outside her tent. All she could see was an empty stretch with a few bushes, where men were taking turns to urinate. There were no facilities available for women. This was the situation nine months ago at the border of Serbia and Hungary, when I visited a refugee camp where men, women, and children were stuck for days. Unfortunately, not much has changed since then, and for one hidden segment of refugee society, life is even harder than this.

The life of a Bollywood stuntwoman outside the realm of the silver screen caught India’s attention last month when a video captured her struggle behind the screen. Geeta Tandon spoke about her marriage at the age of 15 and surviving domestic abuse, including rape, from her husband.

Post-conflict development efforts cannot afford to forget about adolescent youth. While all youth face certain challenges in adolescence, girls are constrained in different, and often more detrimental, ways than boys, particularly in post-conflict settings.

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.

I was stopped by the police one night in January 2015 as I rode the New York City subway. I was making the long trip back downtown from Washington Heights at around 2 a.m. and had fallen asleep. Suddenly, I jolted awake to find an NYPD officer standing over me. The officer asked me to step off the train. I asked him why. He insisted I do it.

Refugees. Srebrenica. The siege of Sarajevo. Burning villages such as Ahmići and Stupni Do. The Omarska camp. Captured in these words are some of the most powerful and lasting images of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war. The media captured many of the crimes committed in this conflict, while one particular set of crimes typically occurred behind closed doors.

The scale of sexualized violence in South Sudan has been described by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as “shocking.” In a March report, the office counted more than 1,300 rapes in just five months in 2015 in a single area of the country, Unity State. And this number is only “a snapshot” of the real total, with women and girls being considered “a commodity” by soldiers.

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.

The Honorable Mary Robinson is the founder and president of the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice and serves as the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Climate Change. She was the first female president of Ireland from 1990-1997 and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997-2002, and is a global leader on issues of women’s empowerment and human rights. In July 2013, I sat down with her to discuss climate justice and the role of women in the fight for peace.

James Dawes writes in the preface of Evil Men: “How can we look at violently invasive and traumatic events with respect and care rather than sensational curiosity? How do profoundly private injuries fit into our mercilessly public spaces? At the center of the answers to these questions is a single, structuring paradox: the paradox of trauma."