Recently, the Obama administration announced a decision to allow 2,000 Syrian refugees to settle permanently in the United States. The refugees would include the most vulnerable—women and children who had been “exposed to everything from torture to gender-based violence to serious medical conditions,” Foreign Policy reported.

Sometimes I read something that makes the movement of the world, the very air in the room, freeze to a stop. That’s what happened recently when I read a letter written by an activist in the Democratic Republic of Congo named Neema Namadamu. I read it once, then I read it again. Instead of describing why it had such a profound effect on me, I’m pasting it in full below.

If you follow debates about sexualized violence in the United States or elsewhere, in war or in peace, then you’ve probably heard at least some of the following statistical (or quasi-statistical) claims about patterns of rape: One in three U.S. women has been sexually assaulted. Seventy-five per cent of Liberian women were raped during the civil war there. Sexualized violence is declining (or increasing). Intra-military rape in the U.S. is down.