On February 24, a friend of mine posted an editorial on social media about a bill passed in the Pakistani Senate four days earlier, which punishes individuals who hinder prosecutions in rape cases or stigmatize the survivor. My friend asked: “How was this story not all over the news?”

In a visit to India in January, U.S. President Barack Obama said women everywhere should be able to “walk the street or ride the bus and be safe.” They should be “treated with respect,” he said. Yet less than two months before that visit, a 26-year-old woman from Delhi said she was raped by a taxi driver for Uber, a Web-based taxi firm that allows passengers to book rides using a phone app.

Twenty-five years of breathing in dust has led Mireille Mbale to drink milk when she can afford it; it is what she believes will guard her against lung disease. She makes less than $5 a day. Years of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s brash sun have dried her exposed skin.

While the news cycle in January was dominated by reports on Japanese hostages held by the militant group Islamic State and the Paris attacks on the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, some stories didn’t receive as much attention.

The conflict in eastern Ukraine, now in its 10th month, has taken a heavy toll on the country’s population. Wide-ranging violations of international humanitarian law have been documented on both sides of the conflict, following clashes between Russian-backed rebels and the Ukrainian government forces in the eastern regions of the country.

We know there’s a problem but we don’t know how big it is. That’s what governments, scholars, and others argue when trying to figure out how to allot funds toward this problem of sexualized violence in conflict. If we don’t know the numbers, they ask, how can we help properly? How can we mount prosecutions? Offer reparations? Put in place proper advocacy? So the thinking goes.

Thirty-year-old Anna Guz was held by pro-Russian rebels for six days in May. (Guz is not her real name; she asked to be identified by a pseudonym for safety reasons.) Men in military uniforms abducted the pro-Ukrainian activist, along with her boyfriend, from her Donetsk apartment in the middle of the night.

At the age of 18, Leyla’s three-year lesbian relationship was discovered. She ran away to Baghdad from her home in the conservative Iraqi city of Basra, though her girlfriend wasn’t able to escape. Staying behind turned out to be deadly.

With the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence starting tomorrow, November 25, I thought I’d share some of my favorite recent reads on gender-based violence, whether close to home or far afield.

Countless women and girls have been raped to death, held as sexual slaves, gang raped, and subjected to sexual mutilation in conflicts during the last century—in the Rwandan genocide, the Nanking massacre, the war in the former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone’s civil war, and Burma’s long-running armed conflict, to name a few.

Bimbatta Niamey, a poised and soft-spoken woman from West Africa’s Burkina Faso, was suddenly stripped of all her stability and left to rebuild her life alone in December 2012, when her husband died of liver complications. The family of her husband, who was a chauffeur, immediately withdrew her entire savings while she cared for him.