Journalists and activists in Bosnia and Herzegovina are routinely harassed, threatened, and intimidated for their work with refugees and migrants entering the country via the Western Balkan route.

Choosing journalism as a profession in Syria in the late 1990s was almost as unusual for a young girl as choosing to become a professional soccer player. “There were a lot of women studying media, but we already knew that we [would] not work as journalists,” said Rula Asad.

Anneke Lucas survived being trafficked for sex not once, but twice. “I was 9 years old when an elderly English-speaking man took me to the United States in his jet and sex-trafficked me in a luxurious hotel,” says Lucas, an anti-trafficking advocate and the founder of the nonprofit organization Liberation Prison Yoga.

In the languages of the former Yugoslavia “suza” means “tear.” And in the more than 20 years that have passed since the end of the wars that dismantled the country in the 1990s, it seems that there is one, very last tear that many mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters cannot shed until the mortal remains of their closest kin are found, identified, and properly buried.