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.

Rape turns bodies into weapons. But in many cases, literal weapons facilitate the act itself. As one Congolese woman told Amnesty International in 2011: “A guy with a machete in a village can rape one woman. Two guys with a machine gun can rape the whole village.” Guns not only facilitate rape but also heighten its danger. With guns, women are shot in the vaginas, leading to death or debilitating injuries such as fistula. With guns, and other weapons, rape “is often used as a predecessor to murder.”