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"You just stop being human," says Irina, swallowing hard. What she and thousands of Ukrainian women have experienced since the outbreak of the war is hard to put into words and impossible to understand. Time heals all wounds, so they say. Maria shakes her head. She has been trying for thirty years to forget what members of Hutu militias did to her during the genocide in Rwanda - in vain. For years she hated her son because the perpetrator's blood flows through his veins. Sexual violence, which is used strategically to suppress people in many wars, was long considered unavoidable collateral damage. But mass rapes are more than individual crimes. The perpetrators use them to break the very core of a society. For the women affected, the actual act of violence is usually just the beginning of a decades-long martyrdom. ► Subscribe to our YouTube channel and activate the bell so you don't miss a video: https://goo.gl/Fy28as ► NZZ Format: Documentaries from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: every Thursday at 11 p.m. on SRF1. ► NZZ Erklärt: Explanatory videos from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: / @nzz_erklaert