In seven successive reports, the United Nations has chronicled how women and girls are abused on and off the battlefield, by strangers and by family members, not just as an accident of war but also in a deliberate strategy to terrorize and humiliate, from Myanmar to South Sudan to Colombia.

In Syria and Iraq, jihadist groups have taken it a step further: They are selling and enslaving women as part of a strategy, Ms. Bangura said, to raise funds and recruit.

Ms. Bangura is Muslim, and this infuriates her.

“The religion I grew up in doesn’t ask you to sell women in the market,” she said. “Women are being taken three centuries back.”

According to Ms. Bangura’s latest report, 45 armed groups around the world, both government forces and rebels, use sexual violence as a weapon. Among those, three jihadist groups issued statements denying the accusations, which at least shows that they are paying attention, she said.

But in wartime, the dangers women face are not at the hands of gunmen alone, she learned. As refugees, they are at risk of higher levels of domestic violence at home and sexual harassment when they step out. They are stigmatized if they are known to have been detained. Poverty can make them especially vulnerable to sexual exploitation.

Ms. Bangura’s fate was the subject of that early clash between her parents. Had she not been an only child, Ms. Bangura said, her mother would never have been able to muster the money to send her to school.

Her mother’s death was another turning point. By custom, it fell to her father to bury her mother — not to her, because she was unmarried. Ms. Bangura was outraged. And so, the day of the funeral, she married the man she had been living with. Together, they laid her mother to rest. (They are still married, 22 years later.)