A reading of this book, even a glance through it, brings sharply to mind the monumental task that Mary Robinson undertook when she surrendered the Presidency of Ireland to become United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights.

Righting the wrongs that reach the media, alone presents an impossible task, given the determination of the perpetrators and the lack of will shown by the international community. But few of the outrages which feature in these 19 chapters have ever reached our newspapers and fewer still appeared on television news. Why?

Men decide the politics that result in wars, genocides, famines, refugees and also, to a large extent, the reporting of them. The thesis of the book is that women's experience of the catastrophes that result from these wars, from religious and political fundamentalism, population movements and "ethnic cleansing", is different from and in most cases probably more devastating than that of male victims; but, principally, that it goes unrecorded in the chronicles of the times. These are all modern catastrophes, starting with Joan Ringelheim's glance back at the Holocaust. She writes that it took 50 years to uncover the fact that Jewish women, then in hiding, were sexually abused by their male benefactors, and also by the inmates of the camps. They remained silent because they believed that these experiences were part of women's lives and bore no relationship to the Holocaust.

There was no ambiguity (or invisibility) about the rape of women during the war in the former Yugoslavia. Euan Hague blames a culture of masculinity: "by raping women, girls, men and boys . . . Bosnian Serb forces not only bolstered their own masculinities and identities as `Serbs' but eroded the identities of the non-Serbs by the extreme humiliation." It was a "nationalised" version of masculinity demonstrating "power, domination and violent subjugation".

Rada Boric adds that these women were further humiliated when their rapes were broadcast by their own side in the propaganda war.

In her chapter on Belfast, Lorraine Dowler maintains that the primary role of women in Northern Ireland is "to produce and rear children for the next generation of Irish voters". She holds that war "has traditionally been considered the quintessential proving ground for masculinity", and that in the North women have been excluded from the political arena and "confined to the home" as a boost to this masculinity. Furthermore, their occasional role as paramilitaries is played down "because women aren't supposed to be doing the same thing" as men.

However frustrating that may be for the women of the North, their plight is minor compared to the sufferings of the women in Tahiti-Polynesia from French nuclear testing in their area. Apart from the degradation which French colonisation had already visited on these women, radioactive contamination of their environment has left them with increasing cancer rates and the birth of babies so deformed that they have no human shape.

Zohl de Ishtar writes that children are born with no hands or feet, mentally and growth-retarded; some are "born like jellyfish" with no eyes or heads or arms or legs. "They do not shape like human beings at all."

Then there is the newly revealed history of the 200,000 Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Malaysian, Indonesian and Dutch women kidnapped to be the "comfort women" for the Japanese army during the second World War (each one serviced, i.e. raped by, between 30 and 60 soldiers a day); the mass rapes and abduction of women during the partition of India; the genocide in Tibet; the oppression of women in the name of machismo or religion; and much more.

A word of warning. Ronit Lentin's introduction is written in such an indigestible jargon that it could put off an interested reader. Leave it until last; the other chapters are important and accessible.