Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald spent twenty-eight years developing ways of offering care and healing to women who, as children and or as adults, survived being tortured, trafficked, and who suffered other forms of sexualized exploitation inflicted by their parent(s), a guardian, or a spouse. And they welcomed hearing from other women who suffered torture when exploited in prostitution or pornographic violence. They have stood persistent to defy social willingness to ignore that such violence existed by calling for non-State torture to be criminalized and they utilize their website www.nonstatetorture.org to promote global awareness. Their ground-breaking work began in 1993, fifteen years before the United Nations Committee against Torture ventured to write, in 2008, that acts of torture committed by private individuals or groups are specific human rights violations. Since 2004, they have been promoting its recognition in side event panels at United Nations sessions in New York, Geneva, and Vienna. With a co-authored chapter included in the book, Gendered Perspective on Torture: Law and Practice, launched at the United Nations by Ambassadors from Denmark and Norway, in response to former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan E. Méndez's innovative work on gender perspectives on torture. They celebrate this publication because back in 1993 they could find no literature on how to offer recovery care to women who survived such torture; they made it a goal to break this silence. They have done so with dozens of publications. Now they detail the intimacies of their journey in Women Unsilenced. They value their friendship that has flourished as they travelled through offering care, hope, and belief to women during their work of recovery. They are often asked how two women-two nurses-who live in a little Canadian Nova Scotia town managed to achieve what they have. Their answer is simple: "We cared!"
