Tucked away in the graffitied center of Athens is a soothing example of 1920s architecture. High ceilings and arched doorways lead to a stone-walled patio. The feeling inside is fresh on a sweaty day in Greece, with a breeze winding through tall, paneled windows. But it is the life inside, the laughter and chatter, that makes this a truly calming place.

Here was yet another family flung across the sea from Syria sitting in an air-conditioned, yet still stuffy, container that is their temporary home on the island of Samos in Greece. With so many of them having made it to the country together, the Al-Ghateb family stood out from the hundreds of single men and mothers with children at the camp.

“My friend, my friend!” Two little Syrian girls come running toward me as they see the camera around my neck. These two words are part of their limited English vocabulary, a language they are being taught in school at the Vathi refugee center—known as a “hot spot”—on the island of Samos in Greece.

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.

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.