In the 1990s I began working for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). My first assignment was in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, at the end of the violent conflict there. It was at a time when feminist scholarship was becoming particularly interested in women's rights under international humanitarian law in the context of war. This was my first encounter of working with women who had survived the horrors of armed conflict during which the worst traits of humanity are exhibited, and as later conflicts continue to show, violence against civilians occurs with increasing regularity. Part of my job was to find protection solutions for the Kosovo Albanian and Roma refugees who had sought asylum in Bosnia, in particular the many victims of rape and sexual violence. These solutions included finding resettlement places for them and their families in third countries. Most of the women and girls I met had been subjected to rape and other forms of physical and sexual assault, often multiple times, held as sex slaves, and deprived of their liberty.

In order to provide protection to these women and to offer them durable solutions in the form of resettlement, we first had to establish that they were ‘refugees’ and that they had been ‘persecuted’ according to the definition of a ‘refugee’ under Article 1A(2) of the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees 1951. We began framing their cases as incidents of torture, an approach that was later supported by feminist writings around that time.