There’s a darkish room, maybe 12 feet by 13 feet, tucked into the back area of the ground floor of a school called Lycée Wima. Seated along walls of peeling paint are more than a dozen women sewing patterned bags, shoes, dresses, and dolls on elegant Singer sewing machines from the time between the last world wars. The work is exacting.

Effects of a conflict linger differently on different people. The following excerpt from my book, Mother, Where’s My Country?, is a story of struggle, loss, lack of closure, and denial of memory and justice. The book and excerpt are set in the northeast Indian state of Manipur, a gritty landscape.

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.

When we talk about rape and sexualized violence, there is a tendency to think of it as something that happens to “others,” somewhere far away. But legal scholar, professor, and advocate Sarah Deer knows all too well that gender and sexualized violence is not limited to Syria, or Bosnia, or the Democratic Republic of Congo. It continues to happen right here in North America.

Media coverage of U.S. campus rape and sexualized violence is significantly skewed toward the bylines and voices of men, according to a Women’s Media Center report released today.

There are various forms of violence that women and girls experience, but intimate partner violence is, by far, the most common, with one in three women affected globally. And while a common approach to designing prevention programs for intimate partner violence includes targeting men and women in relationships, new evidence shows that the approach may be misguided.

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.

Developing a full understanding of how sexualized violence plays out around the globe requires a lot of context. At its most basic, the issue is already difficult to comprehend, but when it happens in war, or when you begin to unpack its intersection with topics like gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or colonization, it can be intimidating just trying to figure out where to start.

I’d been working on a short radio story for the July 30 UN World Day Against Trafficking in Persons when I realized that the fight against human trafficking in my country, Italy, has become a disaster.

For women, the world might feel like it’s slowly becoming worse. Earlier this month, the UN announced that four peacekeepers in the Central African Republic have been accused of raping two women and an underage girl, as well as a 12-year-old girl. Last month, four women were raped and killed in Mexico City. And then there’s Syria, where reports keep emerging of how Islamic State militants justify raping women and children.

“Who Killed Rúben Espinosa?” read headlines throughout Mexico after the brutal murder of five people in Mexico City. On July 31, the victims were found in an apartment the Narvarte neighborhood of Mexico City.

When I met Sophie Otiende, she was running late. I had reached out to her in December 2014 while I was in Nairobi doing research for a film about sex trafficking. Sophie and her boyfriend, Jakob Christensen, are volunteers at the anti-trafficking nonprofit HAART Kenya and had agreed to meet me for dinner. But as time wore on, I was beginning to think I’d been stood up.

A few months ago, an Indian-American Hindu, a Christian Armenian-American, an American Jew, and a Muslim Pakistani-American filmed 22 strangers addressing questions about their experiences regarding gender, race, and wealth. We wanted to produce a website of short videos that explore the concept of “privilege.”

Dirty white gates fronted the detention center on the Italian island of Lampedusa, a tiny speck between Sicily and Tunisia, where 71 women were being held. Beyond the bars, I could just make out laundry hanging from the building in which they were housed—maybe 100 yards away—a yellow scarf, a hot-pink piece of cloth.

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.

The end of June was hot and dry in Lampedusa, as summer always is. The week I spent on the island of an estimated 5,000-6,000 Italians there was a very separate center of town for a population of 771 people.