“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.

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.

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.