Emrah Yorulmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty ImagesAngelina Jolie is certainly doing what she can to make the world a better place.
On Tuesday, the 39-year-old actress and England's First Secretary of State William Hague launched an academic center focused on combatting and preventing the violence faced by women in war zones.
The Centre of Women, Peace and Security, based at London's School of Academics, will, per a press release, "focus on the participation of women in conflict-related processes and on enhancing accountability and ending impunity for rape and sexual violence in war."
In a statement, Jolie said: "I am excited at the thought of all the students in years to come who will study in this new Center. There is no stable future for a world in which crimes committed against women go unpunished. We need the next generation of educated youth with inquisitive minds and fresh energy, who are willing not only to sit in the classroom but to go out into the field and the courtrooms and make a decisive difference."
"If you were to ask me who I think this centre is for, I picture someone who is not in this room today," said Jolie, per the U.K.'s Guardian. "I think of a girl I met in Iraq three weeks ago. She is 13 years old, but instead of going to school, she sits on the floor in a makeshift tent."
Jolie, a special envoy for the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, explained that the girl was captured by ISIS as a sex slave and repeatedly raped. "Now she may never be able to complete her education, or get married or have a family, because in her society victims of rape are shunned, and considered shameful," she said. "To my mind, what we have begun today at LSE is for that Iraqi girl and others like her."
The center will support the aims of the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative (PSVI), co-founded by Jolie, Hague, the London School of Economics and the U.K. government in 2012.