The frontlines of modern warfare are no longer in trenches or battlefields but in homes, communities and the bodies of women.

Rape and sexual attacks on women and girls are being used as a deliberate and strategic method of warfare. It is a tool of torture, spreading terror, demoralising communities and destroying group identities.

In Eastern Congo it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of women and girls were raped during the conflict of the last decade. Some 50,000 women were raped in Bosnia in 1992; an estimated 500,000 women were raped during Rwanda's 1994 genocide.

Rape has always occurred in war, but it is only in the past two decades that mass rape has been successfully prosecuted as a war crime.

While women are targets and victims of modern war, they are also demanding a more active and positive role in ending conflict and putting in place the foundations for peace.

They are forcing a change to the old formula of men with guns being the sole arbiters of a peace deal because those processes often fail to deliver lasting peace or justice for crimes against civilians, especially women.

It was women in Northern Ireland who played a major role in the drive for peace. In Rwanda, after the genocide, women have been at the forefront of efforts to reconcile Hutu and Tutsi and create a stable government.   

In Liberia, the determination of women to find a way to end years of fighting helped get formal peace negotiations concluded successfully. As the talks reached a stalemate and fighting worsened, 200 women barricaded the warlords and government representatives in a conference room and refused to let them out until they reached a compromise. Liberia has since elected Africa's first woman president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.  

In the Middle East, there are Palestinian and Israeli women's groups that have supported a two-state solution and a negotiated settlement for two decades.

Yet, despite their grassroots work for peace in large numbers, women comprise on average less than 10 per cent of peace negotiators and less than 2 per cent of mediators. Out of approximately 300 peace agreements reached in 45 conflicts since the end of the Cold War, only 10 peace processes even mentioned sexual violence.

Too often, it is the male political and military leaders who are invited or persuaded to draw up peace settlements, even though they may have little interest in sustaining peace. The community-based perspective that women bring is too often excluded from the talks and reconstruction process which follows.