proof-vs-perosnal memory

Whenever I watch court cases where people testify as witnesses to their own or other people's ordeals and it gets rejected as insufficient evidence I often wonder how does one proof what happened to them? Take the Serb-Bosnian war for example where Bosnian Muslim women were raped on numerous occassions, some of them according to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia trial as young as 15. So this 15 year old grows up but is still haunted by the memories of those rapes and decides to get justice when she's in her late twenties. Since then the war has ended, the places where these rapes took place had been demolished and she does not have any clothes for DNA traces to be done. Long story short; she only has her memories. How does she proof what happened to her and subsequently bring the perpretrators to justice?

These type of incidents happen in my homeland all too often. When I went to Somalia some years ago, I got acquainted with a few young ladies who live on the border city of Balanballe, right next to the Ethiopian border. They informed me there is an Ethiopian military base right by the border and many Ethiopian soldiers wander in and out of the city on a frequent basis. Sometimes they take Somali men they claim are planning a terrorist attack on Ethiopia, sometimes they take young women. Some of the ladies I met were amongst those taken. They told me how they would come late at night as the ladies are about to shut their small cafes known there as 'bibito' and tell them they have to come out and meet them at the border, otherwise they will take their male family members such as their fathers, brothers, uncles, husbands etc and kill them. Out of fear these ladies would go to the border and get taken into the Ethiopian compounds. What happens to them in there surpasses the term 'horrific torture'.

Yet these women have to come back to a lawless country where the culture demands women to not speak of gross atrocities such as these, as the women told me. In fact it is frowned upon for women to speak of any form of sexual activity. They have to get on with life as if nothing happened all along whilst carrying this burden.

I felt helpless as I listened to their stories but even when I came back to the West I was still in a position of helplessness. Everytime I watch a court case story on TV where human stories get classified as insufficient evidence or hear stories of physical abuse, I remember these women and ask myself how exactly do you prove you got raped when all you have is your memory.