For decades, female journalists struggled for the right to report about war and conflict on an equal footing with their male colleagues. While women had covered World War II and the wars in Korea and Vietnam, only a few had gone to the front lines. By the time the conflicts in the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan broke out, however, women reporters were there—embedded with troops or tracking rebels. This progress came despite the fact that in many places around the globe, there were strong cultural barriers to a woman reporting the news.

But as women won the right to cover fighting, they also paid a price. Female journalists were disproportionately vulnerable to sexual aggression: from armed fighters, government minders, terrorists and militants—even their own sources and fixers. What’s more, they paid that price in silence. Women reporters seldom spoke of sexual harassment, partly from feelings of confusion and shame and partly from fear of losing future assignments. Rarely could women war correspondents, for example, discuss openly whether there were circumstances in which they needed to behave differently from their male colleagues and, if so, how? Beneath the silence was the unspoken question: were there parts of the world, and situations, into which it was inadvisable to send female correspondents?

Freelance photographer Lynsey Addario had broken the barrier. For years, she had reported from conflict zones in the Middle East and Africa. She was familiar with the physical and emotional challenges facing women journalists, and had reported widely on regional issues of women’s health, sexual oppression, and sexual violence. The MacArthur Foundation in 2009 awarded her one of its “genius” grants for her work on conflict and the lives of women in male-dominated societies.

In late February 2011, the New York Times sent Addario to Libya to cover the populist uprising against Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the strongman who had ruled the North African country for 42 years. It was the third act of the drama first played out earlier that year in Tunisia and Egypt, a seemingly democratic insurgency heralded as the “Arab Spring.”

Addario crossed into Libya from Egypt without a visa on February 26. For several weeks, she traveled with a shifting group of Western media colleagues. They watched what was first a spontaneous, largely peaceful uprising transform into violent battles as the tide turned against the rebels. In March, the journalists found themselves under fire from airstrikes, helicopter attacks, mortar rounds, and sniper fire.

On March 15, Addario and three male Times colleagues were in the beleaguered town of Ajdabiya when their driver decided to make a dash for the eastern gate of the city—and back to the relative haven of Benghazi. They were unlucky. Just five minutes after a car full of French journalists successfully gunned their way past a checkpoint manned by Qaddafi forces, the Times journalists were stopped. Soldiers dragged them from the car and threw them to the ground. Addario had a gun to her head.

On February 11, CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan had been viciously attacked in a crowded square in Cairo. At the time Addario, while upset, had considered the incident an aberration. But now, in the hands of Libyan soldiers, she was afraid. She tried to think clearly. What did it mean to be a woman in this situation? Would she be raped? Or worse, killed? What did her professional experience and regional knowledge count for now?