This innovative book pioneers a new way of understanding and treating traumatised people. A literary as well as scientific achievement, it draws on interviews with refugee women from Middle East and Latin America to create a highly original narrative. This is structured around a metaphor of rooms and borders that represent the women’s life experiences, from girlhood to womanhood, and their traumas of imprisonment, torture and, often, rape. Inger Agger explores, in particular, the sexual abuse of women, seeking to understand how it is related to the surrounding gender and political power structures. Drawing upon ethnography, anthropology and cultural history, her book provides an interdisciplinary model for the therapeutic understanding and treatment of women not only traumatised by political violence, but sexual trauma in general.