Angelina Jolie is one of six "role models for a better world" due to her work raising awareness about sexual violence worldwide, according to Glamour writer and author Mariane Pearl, who the actress portrayed in the 2007 biopic A Mighty Heart.
The 39-year-old actress is a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador who has traveled to dozens of countries around the world, including war zones, and visited with survivors of rape and other types of assault. She has spoken about the issue several times at major events. Last month, Jolie co-chaired and spoke at the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict.
"Everywhere I went ... rape was the silent killer," the writer quoted Jolie as saying in a Glamour magazine article posted on July 9. "But it became quickly clear to me that these women were not just the collateral damage of war. Rape was a strategic, organized scheme to destroy entire communities."
"This is not a woman problem," Jolie adds. "It's a crime against humanity."
Jolie made a similar comment in June, 2013 at a United Nations Security Council conference, where she called for more attention to be given to war zone sexual violence.
In the piece, the widow of slain Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl praises the work of Jolie as well as that of five other women who have spoken out against sexual violence—Julienne Lusenge of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Colombian journalist and rape survivor Jineth Bedoya, Sierra Leonean politician and activist Zainab Bangura, Whaku Shee of Burma and Suraya Pakzad, who ran a secret school in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan (all are pictured above).
"We care for each other—and for each other's children," Pearl quotes Jolie, a mother of six, as saying.