Salon’s feminist writer Mary Beth Williams on how she struggles to survive while people say mean things to her on Twitter:

While Yazidi women behind held by ISIS are gang raped and forced to convert to Islam:

Yazidi girls kidnapped by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria jihadists were given the chance to convert to Islam but told if they refused they would automatically become Muslims anyway the moment an ISIS fighter raped them, U.S. lawmakers heard on Wednesday.

During a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on ISIS’ war on religious minorities, a representative of a California-based, non-profit organization recounted the testimony of some of the Yazidi girls she met and counseled during recent trips to Iraq.

“In one night [in Sinjar town in northern Iraq] ISIS came and took all these girls,” said Jacqueline Isaac, vice-president of the group Roads of Success.

“And they told them first – they gave them an option. They said, ‘Will you become a Muslim? Will you convert to Islam?’

“And many of them said no,” Isaac continued. “And they told them, ‘You are going to be Muslim regardless, because we are going to sleep with you. And the moment that we do that, once we rape you, you will be Muslim.’”

And Boko Haram straps bombs to young girls (after they’ve been raped):

The United Nations said Tuesday that Boko Haram is responsible for an “alarming spike” of suicide bombings in Nigeria that have been carried about by women and children.

Girls between the ages of 7 and 17 years have been used for three-quarters of all such attacks in the region since 2014, the U.N. children’s agency reported. There have been 27 suicide bombings in the region over five months, compared to 26 in all of 2014.

“Children are not instigating these suicide attacks; they are used intentionally by adults in the most horrific way. They are first and foremost victims — not perpetrators,” said Jean Gough, UNICEF representative in Nigeria.