In August 2014, Nadia Murad was a 21-year-old Yazidi student living in Kocho, northern Iraq, when Islamic State (Isis) fighters seized the town. They rounded up all the Yazidis, and reportedly killed 312 men in an hour. But what then happened to Murad and her sisters – among thousands of women captured and taken by the extremists – was to cause her to long for her own death.

Taken to Mosul, Murad was held for three days before she and other female prisoners were “distributed” to Isis fighters. She was trapped, and she was raped; repeatedly, consistently, constantly. After an escape attempt, she was recaptured, beaten and subjected to a gang rape by six men as “punishment”. In a speech she has since made to the UN, Murad revealed: “They continued to commit crimes to my body until I became unconscious.”

Other women committed suicide in captivity; Murad herself wished her captors would just kill her. Three unimaginable months passed but then Murad made an extraordinary escape. She managed to flee as far Germany, where she was provided safe asylum in Stuttgart. Her advocacy for Isis’s victims has since seen her made a UN Goodwill Ambassador, speaking out against the furtherest extremities of horror that she, a real human being, has survived. “We were not worth the value of animals,” she told a recent audience in Cairo. “They raped girls in groups. They did what a mind could not imagine.”

Her experience, of course, is one of the horrific hallmarks of Isis, whose narcissistic seizure of religious text fuels self-justifying pretexts for committing personal atrocities. They have kidnapped thousands of women and girls like Murad, and they have dedicated infrastructure for the enslavement and trafficking of their prisoners.

Investigations have uncovered networks of warehouses where women are held, inspected, marketed and shipped along, fleets of buses used to transport them, bureaucratic records of the sale and purchase of women. The New York Times and Human Rights Watch have documented their record of sexual violence, their crimes against the Yazidi have been exposed by the UN, and the group themselves have even published “doctrine” that codifies and celebrates their cruel use of sexual slavery.

And yet, while UN resolutions are very clear that sexual violence within armed conflict is a war crime, there exists grey spaces in domestic laws that may allow Isis perpetrators impunity for their organised sexual violence. Of the 30,000 Isis recruits from 89 countries, 100 are estimated to be Australian, and urging the Australian government to commit to the prosecution of sexual violence as war crime is a campaign that local human rights activist Susan Hutchinson has taken to Canberra this week.

“Gendered crimes are often being perpetrated outside the jurisdiction of institutions willing and able to bring the perpetrators to justice,” Hutchinson explains. “In 2014, Angelina Jolie and William Hague launched the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative with projects to aid in the documentation and investigation of sexual violence in conflict, but despite advances at the International Criminal Court, these crimes are often still overlooked.”

Hutchinson’s Prosecute, Don’t Perpetrate campaign has a simple ask: that Australia heed its obligations under UN resolutions to “investigate and prosecute sexual violence perpetrated as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by Australians who travelled to Iraq and Syria to fight with Da’esh”.

“If countries prosecuted their own nationals for these crimes we would finally go some way to achieving justice for the victims and ending impunity for sexual violence in conflict,” Hutchinson explains.

There’s precedent for Australia to follow: in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity are explicitly outlawed in domestic legislation, and similar laws in Finland and Sweden have been used to prosecute Finnish and Swedish nationals engaged in Isis abuses.

In an Australia finally moved to confront violence against women within its own community, our awareness of gendered violence must also extend beyond our own borders and inspire activism against the violence happening to women and girls around the world, and – right now – at the hands of Isis.

Today marks the international commencement of the annual “16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence” campaign, and it’s a timely occasion to commit to the end of impunity for sexual violence in armed conflict, to develop a political will to investigate war crimes against women and to prosecute them.

We owe it to Nadia Murad, her fellow survivors and those who did not survive. We owe it to every human woman, whose body and life is at stake.