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Silvana Hinestroza Mendoza, 43, holds her grandson as they nap in their home in Riohacha, Colombia, on September 25, 2018. ..It's been seven years since Silvana Hinestroza Mendoza first spoke publicly about being raped by members of a guerrilla group who kidnapped and tortured her when she was a young woman. More than 15,000 Colombian women and girls were raped or otherwise sexually abused during the country's civil war; many remain too terrified or ashamed to tell anyone. After spending most of a hot Wednesday afternoon with a reporter recounting some of the most intimate details of the worst days of her life, Silvana retreated to her grandson's bedroom. Finally speaking the truth about what happened, Silvana said, feels good, even powerful – like a layer of shame peeled back with each telling. But each telling also means exposing painful scars, literal and metaphorical. I photographed Silvana at that axis of strength and depletion, as she sought out the grounding weight of her grandson's small body, and offered him the soft foundation of her own. These are questions everywhere: whose stories we choose to believe, what weight we give a woman's words against a man's, whether women have exclusive jurisdiction over our own bodies. It is simultaneously dignifying and terrifying for women to tell the secrets more-powerful men demand we keep, and it's never felt so important to listen, to believe, and to acknowledge the personal courage and integrity of the women who share their stories with us. “I feel light,” Silvana said after our interview ended. “Like I was carrying something really heavy and I put it down.”..Colombia has some of the most progressive abortion laws in Latin America, but the millions of women displaced for decades by the conflict between the Colombian government and FARC guerrillas, and more recently by crisis in neighboring Venezuela, often find themselves unable to access safe procedures — and to choose for themselves whether or not to continue a pr (KEYSTONE/VII Photo/Nichole Sobecki)