The Expert is a medical and psychological anthropologist with extensive training in public health. Her research and practice have focused on conflict-affected populations, including survivors of conflict-related sexual violence/genocide-rape, youth heads of household, and children associated with armed forces and armed groups.
The Expert conducted four years of in-depth fieldwork on the ground in Rwanda between 2003 and 2012. In 2016, she conducted short-term research in Afghanistan on human trafficking, and in 2017, she directed a center for mental health in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. She has completed short deployments for child protection and mental health support in emergency response, the longest of which was for 3 weeks in 2016 across Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, and Serbia to assess the protection situation of forcibly displaced Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi children seeking asylum.
LGBTQ, Child abuse, Sexual abuse/assault, gender-based violence/domestic violence, child soldiers, forced marriage, FGM/FGC, trafficking, ex-combatant reintegration, ethnic, religious, or tribal discrimination or persecution, torture/risk of political persecution/risk from state actors, risk from non-state actors, sufficiency of protection, Healthcare Access/Health systems capacity, Mental Illness, HIV/ AIDS, Conflict-related sexual violence survivors, youth heads of household, children associated with armed forces and armed groups, children on the move
Written and verbal statements for Rwandan refugee/asylum issues related to LGBTQA+ and ethnicity
UNICEF (M. Zraly, lead author) (2022) Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Children Associated with Armed Groups and Armed Forces Programmes: Operational Guidance, UNICEF, New York, 2022.
Zraly, M. & Kayigore, G. (2021). Resilience and Ethics in Post-Conflict Settings: Kwihangana, Living after Genocide-Rape, and Intergenerational Resilience in Post- Genocide Rwanda. In Textbook of Global Mental Health: Ethical Principles and Best Practice. Springer.
Pérez-Sales, P., & Zraly, M. (2018). From sexualized torture and gender-based torture to genderized torture: the urgent need for a conceptual evolution. The Journal, 28(3).
Zraly, M., Rubin-Smith, J., & Betancourt, T. (2011). Primary mental health care for survivors of collective sexual violence in Rwanda. Global Public Health, 6(3), 257-270.
Zraly, Maggie and Laetitia Nyirazinyoye. (2010) “Don’t Let the Suffering Make You Fade Away”: An Ethnographic Study of Resilience among Genocide-Rape Survivors in Southern Rwanda. Social Science and Medicine 70(10):1656-1664.
Zraly, Maggie. (2010) Danger Denied: Everyday Life and Everyday Violence among Rwandan Genocide-Rape Survivors. Voices 10(1):10-23.