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.

Often stories on the “Mediterranean migrant crisis” use shots of the rescue at sea: A rickety boat overfilled with desperate people wait to board some kind of Navy boat. But what happens to them next?

We began 2015 by looking at underreported stories of rape and sexualized violence around the world. Cases involving sexualized violence against women—its aftermath, its consequences—were falling below the public’s radar. Now, six months in, we thought we’d take a look at some of the good things that have happened—the steps forward in the march to end sexualized violence globally.

In India, it is legal to rape your wife. And as of last month, when a government minister explained why he thought the issue can’t be remedied in his country, marital rape is back in the news.

When Congolese President Joseph Kabila tapped 49-year-old Jeanine Mabunda Lioko, a finance executive and a member of the National Assembly of the Democratic Republic of Congo, to be his special representative on sexualized violence in July 2014, UN representatives hailed the appointment as a “new dawn” in the fight to end rape and child recruitment in the country’s 20-year conflict.

Last week, Human Rights Watch released a report on the campaign of rape being waged in Iraq by the Islamic State (ISIS) and called for medical and psychological help for the survivors. The organization interviewed 20 women and girls in the Iraqi town of Dohuk who escaped captivity by the militant group, and also spoke to medical workers who are doing their best to help the survivors.

On Monday, a report from the UN was made public by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that highlights sexualized violence in war. The report covers attacks conducted in 2014 and describes violence against women in 19 countries—13 conflict zones, five countries that are recovering from conflict, and one “additional situation of concern” (Nigeria).

In February, the London School of Economics and Political Science announced the launch of a new Center on Women, Peace, and Security at the school. The center, which is scheduled to open in 2016, will focus on the “participation of women in conflict-related processes and on enhancing accountability and ending impunity for rape and sexual violence in war,” according to its website.

In 2011, a Thomson Reuters poll found that Somalia was ranked among the top five most dangerous countries to be a woman. Fewer than three years later, Human Rights Watch concluded that two decades of civil conflict in the country had created a large population of civilians vulnerable to sexualized violence, in a report titled “Here, Rape is Normal.”

When the loudest voices against sexualized violence against women have never caused anyone discomfort, it is safe to say that no one thought that their attitudes on women were being challenged. India's Daughter is the first time that those who knowingly or unknowingly espouse rape culture have been unnerved enough that they feel the need to shoot the messenger.

Back in November, global attention shifted for a brief moment from apocalyptic breaking news cycles just long enough for us to have an honest discourse on sexualized violence, thanks to the campaign for 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence. This month, we’ve been given that kind of opportunity again.

The British government is scrambling to find three of its female citizens traveling to join the ranks of foreign recruits to the Islamic State (IS or ISIS). These young women are not alone. According to one recent study, more than 500 women from Western countries have traveled to join the extremists in Iraq and Syria.

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.