Sex crime has a telltale signature, even when those directing the outrages are some of the most powerful men and women in the United States. How extraordinary, then, to learn that one of the perpetrators, Condoleezza Rice, has just led the debate in a special session of the United Nations Security Council on the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.

I had a sense of deja vu when I saw the photos that emerged in 2004 from Abu Ghraib prison. Even as the Bush Administration was spinning the notion that the torture of prisoners was the work of "a few bad apples" low in the military hierarchy, I knew that we were seeing evidence of a systemic policy set at the top. It's not that I am a genius. It's simply that, having worked at a rape crisis centre and been trained in the basics of sex crime, I have learned that all sex predators go about things in recognisable ways.

We now know that the torture of prisoners was the result of a policy set in the White House by the former secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld; the Vice-President, Dick Cheney; and Rice - who chaired the torture meetings. The Pentagon has also acknowledged that it had authorised sexualised abuse of detainees as part of interrogation practices to be performed by females. And documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union have Rumsfeld, in his own words, "checking in" on the sexualised humiliation of prisoners.