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Good morning. We’re hearing more and more reports of rape and sexual assault against Ukrainian women and girls. These are war crimes and a breach of international humanitarian law but these acts are neither new nor limited to a particular part of the world. Yesterday on Woman’s Hour, Professor Jelke Boesten of Kings College, London, said that rape in war can be seen as a military tactic which often aims to destroy the community – that the sexual violence inflicts shame upon the victims and thereby doesn’t only destroy the woman but also the men with whom they are intimately bound in cultural and familial ties. But as in the case of so many wars, these crimes are underreported and can even be lost within the narrative that rape and sexual assault against women, are the inevitable consequence of war and conflict. What’s more, the focus on evidence of mass rape for it to be deemed a war crime, distorts the individual and personal nature of the complete devastation women can experience. For those who survive, whether or not they will get justice at some distant point in the future, their trauma will be lived out in fragments of what they remember, the courage to tell their truth and the loneliness of living with their secrets. Because so much of the evidence about survivors of rape during and after war, speaks of the shame and rejection women and girls face from their own families, husbands and partners who feel humiliated and parents who feel the stigma of dishonour. In almost every culture in the world, overtly or discreetly, women are judged on what they should preserve – honour and modesty rather than how to protect what might be been taken away from them – their physical integrity as individuals. And in almost every religion, despite the ideals of spiritual egalitarianism in God’s eyes, women have struggled for recognition, respect and equality. The multiple meanings of the Qur’anic verse `men are the maintainers of women’ continues to divide opinion, despite the huge strides made by women - between those who see this verse as essentially requiring men to look after and protect their families and those who see it as a license to control their wives. We are right to seek accountability for sexual violence perpetrated in this conflict. But we also need to acknowledge that what we condemn in the fields of war is actually a partial reflection of what we tolerate in peacetime as well.