I want to go back to Vanessa's post about the stoning of 13-year-old rape victim Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow:

It doesn't get worse than this. Last week, 13-year old Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow was stoned to death in Somalia by insurgents because she was raped. Reports indicate that was raped by three men while traveling by foot to visit her grandmother in conflict capital, Mogadishu. When she went to the authorities to report the crime, they accused her of adultery and sentenced her to death. Aisha was forced into a hole in a stadium of 1,000 onlookers as 50 men buried her up to the neck and cast stones at her until she died. When some of the people at the stadium tried to save her, militia opened fire on the crowd, killing a boy who was a bystander.

More from the BBC:

A witness who spoke to the BBC's Today programme said she had been crying and had to be forced into a hole before the stoning, reported to have taken place in a football stadium. ... She said: 'I'm not going, I'm not going. Don't kill me, don't kill me.' "A few minutes later more than 50 men tried to stone her." The witness said people crowding round to see the execution said it was "awful".

I wrote about the story on Huffington Post and Daily Kos, expressing hope that "we can all work with the incoming administration to begin creating conditions in which we can banish this barbaric and malevolent behavior from our planet." In response, some commenters expressed doubt that we could curtail such monstrosities, arguing that Darfur is an example of global activism yielding dubious results.

Admittedly, it's difficult not to become disillusioned with the grim reality that this kind of brutality continues across the globe and that it's more often women and children who bear the brunt of it.

Still, when we consider Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow's unthinkable fate, one thing is for certain: though we may never eradicate this type of violence, we can't let our doubts stop us from doing everything we can to prevent it from happening. And in the 21st century, the Internet affords us the opportunity to raise awareness on a greater scale than ever before -- witness the Facebook page dedicated to Aisha and the many blog posts and articles about her. We can only hope that as our world becomes more networked, there's a corresponding increase in our collective ability to protect other innocents like Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow.