How international court may give Mali's women a second chance at justice

As Mariam Traoré began her work counseling women, she learned she would have to listen closely.

“They managed to catch me,” some of them would say. Or, “men dragged me somewhere and I did two hours.” “They wanted to rape me, but I defended myself,” another one would explain.

Despite the understatements and denials, “automatically, we understand what happened. These are cases of rape,” Ms. Traoré says, sitting in the office of the Association for the Development of Women’s Rights (APDF) in Mali’s capital, Bamako.

She gathered the testimonies in a dusty, black notepad filled with passport-sized pictures of girls as young as 13. The book speaks to the extent of sexual violence that fell upon Mali’s women in