There’s a darkish room, maybe 12 feet by 13 feet, tucked into the back area of the ground floor of a school called Lycée Wima. Seated along walls of peeling paint are more than a dozen women sewing patterned bags, shoes, dresses, and dolls on elegant Singer sewing machines from the time between the last world wars. The work is exacting.

Maseru, Lesotho—“That’s how African men are,” the woman said. She and two others laughed aloud at the infidelity of their husbands. Their laughter resonated in the hotel lobby, attracting disapproving stares from the men in business suits who occupied most of the other coffee tables.

There are various forms of violence that women and girls experience, but intimate partner violence is, by far, the most common, with one in three women affected globally. And while a common approach to designing prevention programs for intimate partner violence includes targeting men and women in relationships, new evidence shows that the approach may be misguided.

Today, as part of the UN Human Rights Council’s “Universal Periodic Review” process, Burma will be questioned by every country in the world on the nooks and crannies of human rights abuses happening inside its borders

In January 2008, during the violence following Kenya’s disputed elections, someone banged on my door. The man was a friend of my neighbor and, since my neighbor wasn’t home, I thought I might be able to help. But when I opened the door, he forced his way into my house and raped me.

In a swirl of humanity punctuated by police geared with batons, riot gear, and even machine guns, a sense of solace can be hard to find. But for many of the refugees I met at the Hungarian border with Serbia and Croatia, they sought to locate that saving grace in their families, who were both a source of anxiety on this unending journey, and also their succor.

“Do you know where this road goes from here? We are hungry, and my baby hasn’t eaten much,” an exhausted young Afghan woman asks me. Roma, her 2-year-old son, Abraham, and three men from her family were walking on the side of the road in the Hungarian village of Roszke, looking completely lost, when we stumbled upon them.

Almost every hour, the men run to the Serbia-Hungarian border crossing, shouting together, “Open the gate! Open the gate!” But the Roszke Horgos border remains guarded by Hungarian police after the government of Hungarian President Viktor Orbán ordered it shut on Tuesday.

Many of the 3,000 refugees who spent last night on the Serbian side of its border with Hungary are women and children. Hungary shut the border on Tuesday, saying refugees had to apply for asylum before entering the country. Hungarian authorities said that criminal proceedings would be launched against any migrants found crossing the fence illegally and that they could face up to 10 years in prison.

I’d been working on a short radio story for the July 30 UN World Day Against Trafficking in Persons when I realized that the fight against human trafficking in my country, Italy, has become a disaster.

For women, the world might feel like it’s slowly becoming worse. Earlier this month, the UN announced that four peacekeepers in the Central African Republic have been accused of raping two women and an underage girl, as well as a 12-year-old girl. Last month, four women were raped and killed in Mexico City. And then there’s Syria, where reports keep emerging of how Islamic State militants justify raping women and children.

“Who Killed Rúben Espinosa?” read headlines throughout Mexico after the brutal murder of five people in Mexico City. On July 31, the victims were found in an apartment the Narvarte neighborhood of Mexico City.

When I met Sophie Otiende, she was running late. I had reached out to her in December 2014 while I was in Nairobi doing research for a film about sex trafficking. Sophie and her boyfriend, Jakob Christensen, are volunteers at the anti-trafficking nonprofit HAART Kenya and had agreed to meet me for dinner. But as time wore on, I was beginning to think I’d been stood up.

A few months ago, an Indian-American Hindu, a Christian Armenian-American, an American Jew, and a Muslim Pakistani-American filmed 22 strangers addressing questions about their experiences regarding gender, race, and wealth. We wanted to produce a website of short videos that explore the concept of “privilege.”

Dirty white gates fronted the detention center on the Italian island of Lampedusa, a tiny speck between Sicily and Tunisia, where 71 women were being held. Beyond the bars, I could just make out laundry hanging from the building in which they were housed—maybe 100 yards away—a yellow scarf, a hot-pink piece of cloth.

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.