In the shot, taken on Sunday, you can see Honduran mother Maria Meza grabbing the thin arms of her two 5-year-old twin daughters Cheili and Saira as they frantically run from a tear gas canister spewing fumes.

At the close of 2017, I was asked to research a Top 10 list of African women who had made an impact with regard to women’s rights that year was as excited as a kid in a candy store and was super confident that I would produce a forceful article featuring several legendary female African activists- I mean how rare and how cool would such an article be? I was so sure that I would construct my list in no time.

At least 15 million girls have been victims of sexual violence, yet only 1 in 100 sought help, according to the UN’s children’s agency. Most children knew their abusers, says the report’s author Claudia Cappa.

© AFP/Getty Images/D. Dutta

The narrative of sex in India tends to have got stuck on the issues of violence, rape and harassment. This is not surprising considering that India is a country in which a majority of the women face sexual violence on a daily basis.

© picture-alliance/dpa/M. Gambarini

Some questions need to be answered with reason not with fury. But some men just punish women when they question them about the respect they ought to get – the respect, a mother should have taught her sons. But if they do not teach this to their sons, they as women (mothers) betray other women (wives/daughter-in-laws).

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“The United Nations, the US, and countless other countries all know about what is happening to us. Everyone has acknowledged [the atrocities] publicly. We are peaceful people and we are being killed mercilessly,” Ameena Sawwan states.

A raging war in Syria has exposed countless women to mind-numbing violence. (© Russell Watkins/Department for International Development)

For Ameena Sawwan, the survivor of a chemical weapons attack in Syria, it was the Arab Spring that turned out to be the beginning of a nightmare in which she is trapped even today. What started off as peaceful protests against a repressive regime soon gave way to a series of retaliatory attacks by government forces. These days, a civil war rages in her country, a war  which has exposed countless citizens, particularly vulnerable women and children like Ameena and her little nieces and nephews, to mind-numbing violence.