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confess. At one point, the interrogators changed their tactics; their voices grew rougher and they began to hit her. One wallop knocked her to the floor. While she was on the ground, they tied her hands together. She remembered how the rope cut into her skin. One of the men hovered over her. Someone tugged at her clothes. She heard a door open, close.
    â€˜That is where they abused . . .’ she stumbled over the word, ‘. . . me.’
    She said they kept her on the floor. They partially removed her clothes.
    â€˜They said they would do terrible things if I did not cooperate . . .’ Shaheeneez’s shoulders began to shake under her dark coat.
    â€˜They said rape . . . then I was on the floor… then I felt something hard inside me . . .’
    She paused now in this room far from where it actually happened, but she was still trembling, and she moved to thewindow. She opened it, turned her face towards the sunlight, her back to the room. She seemed to gulp air.
    â€˜They raped me,’ she said. She said it again. Then all the breath went out of her.
    Afterwards, Shaheeneez cried for a long time while I sat opposite her. I was unable to say anything that would console her. I laid a hand on her shoulder; she flinched at the touch. The tears rolled off her face onto her collar.
    She said she had been seeing a psychiatrist since the violation, but it didn’t help. At the time, she had been in love. She had plans to get married and had a life mapped out in front of her.
    Her doctor urged her to tell her fiancé the truth. But when she did, he left her. ‘He said he could not marry me, that he had to find a clean woman,’ she said, adding that it is more than a feeling of being violated, it’s one of being completely ruined.
    â€˜But I don’t think the interrogators did the actual rape. I think that man who entered the room did.’ She sat on the bed, sweating and shaking. ‘I think it took them less than half an hour. And then, after they untied me and took off my blindfold, I found blood on my legs.’ She did not know whether the ‘hard thing’ was an object they used to penetrate her, or a penis.
    She had been a virgin.
    Shaheeneez seems as damaged as Nada, but is even less able to cope and continue living. While neither woman will forget what happened, Nada says she wants to move on, to find a new path forward. But Shaheeneez says she cannot forget. The rape, she says, destroyed her life.
    â€˜If I get engaged again,’ she says, ‘I will never tell him.’
    A few days later, I was working inside Atma Camp, the largest internally displaced camp in Syria at that time, home to 50,000 displaced and miserable souls. I was searching for a woman called Rana, who was trying to help a group of other Syrian refugee women who had been raped. In technical terms, they are called ‘survivors’.
    As far as refugee camps go, Atma was well organized. As far as living goes, it was hellish.
    When I found the camp doctor – a young man working in the camp who spoke halting English – and told him what I was investigating, he looked anguished. I had not used the word rape, only ‘sexual violence’.
    â€˜In Syria, the innocent people suffer the most,’ he responded, finally. ‘Do you really find women who have been touched? For us, this is the worst thing to do to the men – because they are our women.’
    We climbed down a hill, passing the water stations that had been set up as showers and sinks. Only a dozen water stations for hundreds and hundreds of people.
    We then realized that a tiny boy was following us. He looked like an ordinary kid, about the age of my own nine-year-old, hiding his face behind a blue hoodie. He was wearing fake G-star jeans.
    But then I saw his face: it was completely burnt. His mouth appeared to be nothing more than a hole and his nose was