What Twenty Years of Reporting on Women and War Has Taught Me

Azra was twenty-nine when I met her in October 2024 at an open-air feeding clinic in a displacement camp in Darfur. The air smelled of mildew and rancid cooking oil, and no one spoke above a murmur. She held her infant daughter, Retal, against her chest, shielding her from the heat. Retal had been born the same month as my daughter, Raven. Yet her head was visibly smaller—malnutrition does that to a brain before it’s had the chance to grow.

Before the war, Azra had lived a simple life in El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur. She was pregnant when the Rapid Support Forces, heirs to the old Janjaweed militias, turned their campaign against the Masalit, Fur, and Zaghawa into what human rights groups now call a “second Darfur genocide.” She fled on foot through the monsoon rains, her three-year-old son bound to her back in fabric so the RSF would not see him. She stepped over the dead. She breathed in the smell of burning flesh.

“I couldn’t sleep; my blood to the baby wasn’t enough,” she told me softly. “The only thing that kept me sane was knowing I would give birth in a safe place, without the sound of bullets.”

Of the fighters, she said: “They took a lot of women into the woods. Even the pregnant women, they beat them, and then evilly dealt with them.”

I don’t share Azra’s account because her war was worse than any other I’ve covered in twenty years of doing this. Every war is a tragedy, and beyond that, horrific atrocities against girls and women fester in the cracks of conflict and ceasefires, and they thrive in “peace time” too. I share it because it makes visible what every one of these incidents has in common: this violence is rarely a single event.

It is a patient, self-perpetuating system, built long before any one person chooses to carry out a single act.

I gave birth to my second daughter, Rumi, this summer, in a quiet room in northern Virginia, a midwife’s hand steady on my back. For the past twenty years, I have interviewed women giving birth elsewhere, on dirt floors, in camps, in the back of trucks, where the line between a live birth and a death certificate is a trained set of hands that never gets there in time.

A woman dies from pregnancy or childbirth roughly every two minutes, according to the World Health Organization. Almost always, it happens somewhere without basic medical safeguards — places I’ve reported from more than once, watching women give birth on dirt floors or in the backs of trucks. My own two daughters were born in a Washington, D.C., hospital, with a midwife who never left my side. That is the only difference—not effort or love, but where you happen to be when labor begins.

Most of what happens in the space between never makes a U.N. report. It doesn’t look like a headline. Sometimes, it just looks like a girl playing with a doll on a concrete floor.

I met her in Khost, Afghanistan, a few weeks after the Taliban seized power in 2021. I was sitting with a group of widows and older women as they spoke fiercely about the need for female teachers—and for girls to remain in school. Then a neighbor’s granddaughter, newly nine years old, came in and sat on the floor beside me, cradling her doll with her eyes lowered.

I found out later she was already engaged. Her parents had taken money from an older man for her hand. Afghanistan’s economy was collapsing, and the custom is that the groom’s family pays. School was already over for her, and the wedding would happen after her first period.  I still think about that little girl. I don’t know if that day has come yet. I suspect it has.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban has banned girls from secondary education, making it the only government on earth to do so. When men and women in Herat took to the streets this June to protest the detention of women arrested over dress-code violations, Taliban forces opened fire, killing a woman and a child. The U.N. human rights chief has warned that Afghanistan’s human rights crisis is “deteriorating dramatically.” The economic free fall accompanying that collapse is one of many forces driving families to marry off daughters like the girl I met in Khost.

Behind that one girl lies a staggering reality: every year, 12 million girls are married before their eighteenth birthday — or one girl every three seconds, according to the U.N. More than 230 million women and girls alive right now have undergone female genital mutilation, and millions more are at risk. Women and girls account for 99 percent of those trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation, according to the International Labour Organization. And every ten minutes, somewhere in the world, a woman or girl is killed by an intimate partner or family member.

None of this is a fringe crime. It’s cemented into how entire societies run.

It costs women physically too, for their whole lives. In August 2024, I sipped tea with a social worker in India named Ruby Singh. She told me her mother, Shakuntala, was married at twelve. She gave birth at fourteen. The baby lived a few days and died. Over the next decade, Shakuntala kept getting pregnant and kept losing the baby. She lost five in a row. Then five survived, Ruby among them. Every birth happened at home, on the floor or a netted stretcher, with only a dai, a traditional birth attendant, to help. Shakuntala is in her fifties now, and she doesn’t talk much about her childhood. I suppose she never had one.

Spend time with enough of these women and the numbers stop being numbers. You remember a name. A face. The exact moment a voice went quiet mid-sentence.

In India, and in country after country I’ve reported from, that same math shows up as femicide. Daughters get erased before they can become inconvenient. Skewed sex ratios at birth tell you, region by region, just how unwelcome a girl is before she’s born. There’s no single crime scene here, no one person to arrest—only generations of families deciding, before a girl can even speak, that she is worth less than her brother.

As I write this, Rumi is not yet two weeks old. I keep thinking about what gets seen and what doesn’t. An airstrike sometimes makes the news. An eleven-year-old girl being walked to an altar usually does not. Neither does an international trafficking ring, or a prison ledger with a pregnant woman’s name on it, or a government that quietly decides a subject isn’t worth teaching a girl. None of it happens by accident. It happens because, long before any of these women were born, society had already decided what their lives would be worth—and denied them any say in how they unfolded.

Azra. Ruby’s mother. The nine-year-old girl in Khost. Strip away the passports and postal codes, and there is no meaningful difference between their lives and my own. The difference is the accident of which government, which clinic, and which family was given the power to decide what their bodies—and their lives—were worth before they ever had a choice.

Somewhere, right now, a woman is deciding what she will endure so her daughter never has to. The least we can do is stop looking away.