A Colombian peace court is opening a new legal case that could bring justice for the first time to thousands of victims of gender-based crimes committed by the FARC and the military during decades of bitter conflict.

Developing a full understanding of how sexualized violence plays out around the globe requires a lot of context. At its most basic, the issue is already difficult to comprehend, but when it happens in war, or when you begin to unpack its intersection with topics like gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or colonization, it can be intimidating just trying to figure out where to start.

Imagine if rape survivors held politicians accountable every time their government failed to protect them. In Kenya, eight survivors of sexualized violence are suing their country for its “non-action” in response to attacks following Kenya’s 2007 general elections. As we’ve written about previously, the post-election violence took place during a dispute over who had won, which developed into tribal clashes.

The father of the woman gang-raped and killed in Delhi in December has told the media that the crime against his daughter is “an awakening” for India. It certainly has been an awakening for much of the world, as I wrote in this op-ed for CNN. The local and international media have been cracking open issues from dowry-related burnings of women to street harassment, asking exactly what is wrong with men in India to have created such a culture of hate and violence against women. It is heartening to watch the introspection.

“I sometimes heard the cries of the girls with my own ears…there were girls who made food that I saw, but also sometimes at night there were commanders…and you could see the girls prepare the food, and at night you could listen to the girls even saying, ‘I don’t want to.’”

The first day of the Ratko Mladić war crimes trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was covered in many major news outlets on Wednesday. Interestingly, while The New York Times pointed out that Mladić is the "last of the major figures in the Balkan wars to face trial" at the ICTY, the Times piece contained no mention of the rampant torture and rape of women during the Bosnian War.

Justice is supposed to confer equality, impartiality, protection for victims, and punishment for perpetrators. Yet as recently as the 1970s, spousal rape was not considered a criminal offense in some U.S. states.

A cab driver abducted Marya, 15. He and another man raped her. Tahmina, 18, was trying to find the boy she liked in the hopes of escaping domestic violence and forced marriage. Two men she didn't know found her instead. They raped her. Malalai invited the guy she was seeing over to her house when she was alone, but he proved to be a mistake and raped her.

Last week, a young woman from the Karen ethnic minority in Burma reported being “beaten, drugged, and sexually assaulted by two men wearing army fatigues.” In November 2011, reports emerged that four women were being kept as sex slaves by the Burmese military near the Kachin-China border; forced to cook and clean during the day and gang-raped at night by the soldiers in the Light Infantry Battalion 321. These reports, unfortunately, are not rare.

More than 100,000 women were raped in the 36-years Guatemalan genocide—at least 200,000 people died. In this video, photojournalists Ofelia de Pablo and Javier Zurita interview survivors and document the ongoing forensic and legal investigation that recently indicted former Guatemalan President Efraín Ríos Montt.

GUATEMALA CITY — A man in a mask opens a door. The smell of rot hovers in the air and everywhere there are piles of paper -- pink, yellow, white, all a bit aged and possibly very important. When searching through the 80 million documents dumped in the archives of the Guatemalan National Police, it's never clear what will turn up.