Priyali Sur

“My friend, my friend!” Two little Syrian girls come running toward me as they see the camera around my neck. These two words are part of their limited English vocabulary, a language they are being taught in school at the Vathi refugee center—known as a “hot spot”—on the island of Samos in Greece.

The woman looked uneasy and uncomfortable as she peered outside her tent. All she could see was an empty stretch with a few bushes, where men were taking turns to urinate. There were no facilities available for women. This was the situation nine months ago at the border of Serbia and Hungary, when I visited a refugee camp where men, women, and children were stuck for days. Unfortunately, not much has changed since then, and for one hidden segment of refugee society, life is even harder than this.

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.

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.

In India, it is legal to rape your wife. And as of last month, when a government minister explained why he thought the issue can’t be remedied in his country, marital rape is back in the news.

In a visit to India in January, U.S. President Barack Obama said women everywhere should be able to “walk the street or ride the bus and be safe.” They should be “treated with respect,” he said. Yet less than two months before that visit, a 26-year-old woman from Delhi said she was raped by a taxi driver for Uber, a Web-based taxi firm that allows passengers to book rides using a phone app.

On May 28, 2014, most Indian newspapers ran front-page stories about two teenage girls, cousins, who had been hanged in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh after being allegedly gang-raped. Some papers also printed the disturbing image of the girls’ bodies hanging from a mango tree in their village. The public display of the young girls, wearing blood-stained clothes and riddled with thorns, caught India’s attention.