Angelina Jolie is continuing her humanitarian work by appearing as a special envoy for refugees at the United Nations Security Council meeting on Monday and urged the nations to make the fight against rape in war a top priority.
Jolie - who was recently in the spotlight after recently after undergoing a double mastectomy and urged woman to get tested - changed gears and focused on her role as a U.N ambassador. Jolie was named as a Special Envoy of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 2012, after previously serving as a Goodwill Ambassador to the body.
"Let us be clear what we're speaking of," said Jolie, who serves as a special envoy of UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres, Newsday notes. "Young girls raped and impregnated before their bodies are able to carry a child, causing fistula. Boys held at gunpoint and forced to sexually assault their mothers and sisters. Women raped with bottles, wood branches and knives to cause as much damage as possible."
Jolie, 37, appearance at the U.N. comes on the heels of a recent trip to the Syrian border, where she met with refugees in what she called "the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st century," according to a UN report of her visit to mark World Refugee Day, June 20.
During her prepared remarks, she pushed for the Security Council to look beyond the vast numbers of men, women, and children who had been the victim of sexual violence, and instead remember that each of those numbers is "a person with a name, personality, a story, and dreams no different than ours and those of our children."
Jolie, a mom of six, shared some of her one-on-one stores with refugees that she met. She spoke of one mother in particular she met from the Democratic Republic of the Congo whose five year-old had been raped in plain-view of a police station.
"The United Nations charter is clear that you, the Security Council, have primary responsibility for the maintenence of international peace and security," Jolie reminded the body, scorning the lack of prosecution of rapists among the ranks militaries and militias and the low priority the international community had given the issue. "Rape as a weapon of war is an assault on security and a world in which these crimes happen is one in which there is not, and never will be, peace," she said.
