In September 2016, when I arrived at a gloomy, two-star Econo Lodge hotel in Fort Lee, New Jersey, Daey*—which means “mother” in Kurdish—was sleeping.

Throughout the conflict in DRC, children have been abducted and made to serve as soldiers. While most are male, it is estimated over a third are female, used mainly as domestic and sexual servants, but sometimes as fighters. Now an NGO has released a report showing that many of the girls weren’t enlisted by force.

On April 20, Marcia Mejía Chirimia, 28, an indigenous Colombian peace and women’s rights activist, received a text message from someone she believes is a member of a paramilitary group.

When Luna Watfa refused to reveal any information to her interrogators, they took her son, 17, and threatened to torture him. “They put my son’s hands behind his back, his T-shirt over his head and they took him,” she says.

Wars fought because of ethnic hatred often seem to be more brutal than others. This is just a personal observation, having studied many. Just look at Rwanda, whose 1994 war saw between 250,000 and half a million women raped, often with objects and often publicly, in order to spread maximum humiliation and terror.

In 2003, Yanar Mohammed decided she’d had enough. The war in Iraq was picking up steam, and she didn’t want to sit idly in Canada as her home country’s women and girls were being victimized in the turmoil. So, she packed up her bags and moved back to Baghdad to find a way to help.

Godeliève Mukasarasi promised God that if her children survived the Rwandan genocide of 1994, she would perform charitable acts. They lived. Soon after, the then 35-year-old social worker and mother founded SEVOTA, or Solidarity for the Development of Widows and Orphans to Promote Self-sufficiency and Livelihoods, a support group for women in the small Rwandan village of Taba.

Little girls returning to school in Fallujah “have nothing to fear,” said Nahla al-Rawi as a few security officers dusted off a chair for her in the partially rehabilitated main hospital. Al-Rawi, 48, is a member of the Anbar provincial council, which is tasked with inspecting and overseeing public facilities such as schools and hospitals.

Mary Elias, of Laje village in Malawi’s southern Zomba district, speaks in metaphors. “We are carrying both water cans,” she says of the situation for single mothers in drought-ridden Malawi—meaning that women with children but without partners are solely responsible for feeding, clothing, and educating their progeny. Already a Sisyphean task in a country the United Nations Development Program regularly ranks in the top 20 poorest on earth, this has become nearly impossible in the past few years.

“Education is important because it builds a person’s mind, and the mind will build the future,” says Ethar, a 15-year-old Syrian girl with a winning smile. Explaining why going to school is important to her, the teenager, who fled Aleppo with her family four years ago, is unwavering in her conviction. Now living in Gaziantep, Turkey, she attends a school for Syrian refugee children.

The air is stuffy by default. Soap, especially laundry soap, is usually a rare commodity among refugees. Add to the muddle of unwashed smells a buzzing from black flies, nearly 100 degree heat, and dark, polyester clothes that cover from head to toe, and life inside a makeshift container on the Greek island of Samos is an unpleasant one, thick with defeat.

On September 16, Nadia Murad, a 23-year-old Yazidi survivor of ISIS captivity, was appointed by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime as the Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking. It was the first time the UN had bestowed the title on such a survivor.

Within the first few days after Sandra Moreno’s daughter, Ana Paula, disappeared in 2009, Moreno reached out to a TV crew a few blocks from her home in the lower-middle-class neighborhood of Carapicuíba, in the Brazilian state of São Paulo.