Lawlessness and sectarian violence quickly engulfed Iraq after the fall of Saddam, leaving women vulnerable. Human rights groups say incidents of rape have increased, and by Iraqi tradition the victims are shunned and sometimes murdered by family members in “honor killings.” Correspondent Anna Badkhen and photojournalist Mimi Chakarova visit a secret women’s shelter in Baghdad to speak with rape victims and war widows and document their stories.

+ Watch the slideshow on FRONTLINE/World and read the story by Anna Badkhen.

+ Watch CIR’s episode of The Investigators featuring Badkhen: “Behind the Veil.”

+ Listen to Badkhen talk about her reporting and her article in Ms. Magazine, “Baghdad Underground,” on PRI’s The World.

Support for this project was provided in part by CIR’s Dick Goldensohn Fund.

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Anna Badkhen has covered wars in Afghanistan, Somalia, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Chechnya and Kashmir. She has reported extensively from Iraq since 2003. Her reporting has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The National, FRONTLINE/World, Truthdig, and Salon. Her book, "A War Reporter's Pantry," will be published in January 2011 by Free Press/Simon&Schuster. She lives in Massachusetts.

For the past decade, photographer and filmmaker Mimi Chakarova has covered global issues examining conflict, corruption and the sex trade. Her film "The Price of Sex," a feature-length documentary on trafficking and corruption premiered this spring. Chakarova was awarded the Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking at the 2011 Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York. She was also the winner of the prestigious 2011 Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting.

This is Chakarova's 14th year teaching visual storytelling at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. She's also taught at Stanford University's African and African American Studies and Comparative Studies for Race and Ethnicity.

She is the recipient of the 2003 Dorothea Lange Fellowship for outstanding work in documentary photography and the 2005 Magnum Photos Inge Morath Award for her work on sex trafficking.

Other awards include a People's Voice Webby as well as a nomination for a News & Documentary Emmy Award.

Chakarova's work has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Ms., The Sunday Times Magazine, London, CBS News' "60 Minutes," CNN World, PBS' FRONTLINE/World and the Center for Investigative Reporting among others. In 2007, Chakarova became the series curator of FRONTLINE/World's FlashPoint, featuring the work of photojournalists from around the world. She is currently a correspondent at the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Capitalism, God, And A Good Cigar: Cuba Enters The Twenty-first Century, published by Duke University Press in 2005, features over 75 of Chakarova's documentary photographs of Cuba.

Mimi Chakarova received her BFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MA in visual studies from UC Berkeley. She has had numerous solo exhibitions of her documentary projects on South Africa, Jamaica, Cuba, Kashmir and Eastern Europe.