We know that thousands of women were raped during the Holocaust. We also know that rape was never part of any charges against anyone responsible for the era’s atrocities. In a thrilling new turn of events, files long locked away at UN headquarters in New York have revealed details of investigations into the use of rape by Nazis. Could this lead to justice for women brutalized in other wars?

It’s been an interesting couple of days. Gloria Steinem (our project’s founder) and I wrote an op-ed for The Guardian about what we’re calling the “cult of masculinity” and its role in rape in conflict and gang violence. The reaction to the op-ed, however, wasn’t pretty.

Gangs of young men rape girls. They also sometimes act as pimps that seduce a girl, then subject her to gang rape or otherwise insist that she sexually service gang members. Some girls are so desperate for acceptance and so convinced by sexual abuse that they have no other value: they see this as inevitable.

I worked for many years as a reporter in upstate New York, where I covered local news like school board meetings and did features on things like watercolor exhibits at one-room libraries in one-traffic-light villages.

Even war is safer than this. Imagine it: Your family attacked. Your house teeming with soldiers. Your options running out. A protected area for victims of war sounds like a wise place to flee.

Let’s blame men. Many of us do—many women and even men blame men for the mass rape of women in war. It’s easy to point our fingers and name the perpetrator. But what if we were to step back and ask how men can actually be part of the solution? It requires a couple of basic assumptions.

Click through to listen to a live interview I did with Sean Moncrieff on Radio Ireland’s “NewsTalk”—he asks solid questions about whether rape has always been used as a weapon of war, and whether men are targeted the same way. Maybe most interestingly, Moncrieff wonders: “Given that atrocities inevitably take place in conflicts, so will rape?”

These indigenous women asked me not to show their faces. But they want their stories told. They traveled far from the Guatemalan highlands at the end of January to tell me and other journalists and activists on a delegation from the Nobel Women's Initiative about their experiences in the country's 36-year genocide and since.

We first thought about starting this piece with the story of Saleha Begum, a survivor of Bangladesh's 1971 war in which, some reports say, as many as 400,000 women were raped. Begum had been tied to a banana tree and repeatedly gang raped and burned with cigarettes for months until she was shot and left for dead in a pile of women. She didn't die, though, and was able to return home, ravaged and five months pregnant. When she got home she was branded a "slut."

It's been less than a year since photojournalist Lynsey Addario returned from Libya, where soldiers loyal to Muammar Gaddafi sexually abused her during six days in captivity. I interviewed Addario just after she returned, and her honesty and stated intention of “shaming the Libyans” for what had been done to her evinced a remarkable personal strength.