Let’s blame men. Many of us do—many women and even men blame men for the mass rape of women in war. It’s easy to point our fingers and name the perpetrator. But what if we were to step back and ask how men can actually be part of the solution? It requires a couple of basic assumptions.

Click through to listen to a live interview I did with Sean Moncrieff on Radio Ireland’s “NewsTalk”—he asks solid questions about whether rape has always been used as a weapon of war, and whether men are targeted the same way. Maybe most interestingly, Moncrieff wonders: “Given that atrocities inevitably take place in conflicts, so will rape?”

These indigenous women asked me not to show their faces. But they want their stories told. They traveled far from the Guatemalan highlands at the end of January to tell me and other journalists and activists on a delegation from the Nobel Women's Initiative about their experiences in the country's 36-year genocide and since.

We first thought about starting this piece with the story of Saleha Begum, a survivor of Bangladesh's 1971 war in which, some reports say, as many as 400,000 women were raped. Begum had been tied to a banana tree and repeatedly gang raped and burned with cigarettes for months until she was shot and left for dead in a pile of women. She didn't die, though, and was able to return home, ravaged and five months pregnant. When she got home she was branded a "slut."

It's been less than a year since photojournalist Lynsey Addario returned from Libya, where soldiers loyal to Muammar Gaddafi sexually abused her during six days in captivity. I interviewed Addario just after she returned, and her honesty and stated intention of “shaming the Libyans” for what had been done to her evinced a remarkable personal strength.

In January 2011, The Economist published the number of women raped in six conflicts, including an estimate of 500,000 women raped in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Many readers may have taken these statistics at face value. In fact, however, estimates of rape in Rwanda range from 250,000 to 500,000 and are based on the number of reported pregnancies from rape, which underestimates prevalence.

When I was overwhelmed by a mob of men in Tahrir Square in Egypt last February, I was filled with the certainty that I would die there. In my mind I could see an image of my body lying discarded in the dirt.

It struck me that it would be a truly meaningless death.