Opinion | The Case for Throwing Stones From a Glass House

When she finally had the chance to confront her rapist in open court, she didn’t flinch.“What you did was bad,” she told the pastor.

“Don’t do that to any other girl.”And he won’t.At age 74, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for assaulting her and others.

But the devastation lingers for the petite and fragile Kenyan girl in braids who was repeatedly raped by the pastor when she was just 7 years old.“I trusted him because he said he was a man of God,” she told me.Now 13, she says she didn’t understand what he was doing to her.

But she knew it hurt, and she was terrified when he warned, “If you tell your parents, I’ll kill you.”Violence against women is a serious problem in the United States, of course.But there has been some progress in America while in many countries a cloak of silence continues to enable such violence.

This is one of the great moral struggles of our time, and we should exercise bipartisan American global leadership to address it.President-elect Donald Trump has talked a good game about prioritizing the fight against human trafficking and child exploitation, and here’s a chance to do so.A new United Nations report estimates that 51,000 women and girls were killed last year around the world by their partners or family members — the equivalent of a good-size war.

The highest number of these femicides, and the highest rate per capita, was in Africa, the U.N.found.Here in Nairobi, a survey found that the first sexual experience of a majority of women in the sprawling warren of alleys that make up the Kibera slum was rape.

UNICEF reported this year a global survey finding that one-third of girls in Oceania had been sexually assaulted by the age of 18, along with 22 percent of girls in Africa; a smaller but still significant number of boys had been sexually assaulted.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify acc...