Breaking Taboos is the investigative rubric of Bilan Media. It is where we report on what Somalia has long refused to discuss publicly — female genital mutilation, sexual violence, drug addiction among young women, HIV, mental illness, albinism, the harassment of women in public space, the children born of rape, the menstrual taboos that keep girls out of school.

These are not "sensitive subjects" we tiptoe around. They are structural injustices hidden behind decades of silence — and silence has always had a cost, paid almost entirely by women, by children, by the marginalised. Our job is not to be polite about them. Our job is to document them, with names, dates, voices, and evidence.

We work slowly. We protect our sources. We do not publish photographs without consent. We pay travel expenses for women who come to speak to us, and we never pay for testimony itself. We return, weeks later, to check that no one has been harmed by what we published — and when someone has been, we say so, in writing, in the next story.

Some of the reports gathered here have been picked up by the BBC, the Guardian, El País, the Toronto Star and The New Humanitarian. But the readers we care about most are the ones in Mogadishu, in Garowe, in Baidoa — the women who, after reading our work, write to us to say: "I thought I was the only one."