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For most of us, the term ‘genocide’ will be forever associated with the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps and the deliberate effort to exterminate the Jews during World War II. We all know too well what happened in the late 1930s and 1940s. Although I am a Scot of Catholic background, I am married to a man whose mother was a Jewish refugee from Vienna. She and her sister, both highly trained doctors, fled Austria after the Anschluss. They were able to bring their mother from Austria with the help of the British Quaker community who sponsored her. We still have among family papers her passport, which bears the stamp ‘J’ for Jew. They came to this country fleeing persecution and would have been sent to concentration camps had they remained in their home. We always link back to the Nazi atrocities to remind ourselves about the past and to use this past to shape our future. However, despite this remembered history, we still fail to learn the lessons that would ensure such atrocities do not happen again. Genocide is a word that carries incredible weight, and its importance cannot be diluted. ‘Genocide’ has a specific legal meaning and the alarming truth is that, while genocidal violence has been perpetrated on a number of occasions around the world since Word War II, there is often resistance to using the terminology and a refusal to recognise genocide as genocide, because it carries inconvenient legal responsibilities. The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as, ‘[acts] committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.’ The genocides in Central Africa—the Congo, Rwanda, the Sudan, and Uganda—proved to us that genocides were not a thing of the past. Only a few years ago, we watched as Daesh perpetrated horrific atrocities against the Yazidi and other religious minorities. The Yazidi were perceived by Daesh as primitive because their religious observance was not of the Abrahamic tradition; they were seen as sub-human and, as a result, Daesh felt at liberty to reduce this people to nothing. Men and boys were slaughtered by beheading. Captured Yazidi women and girl children were used as sex slaves, raped and raped over and over again, and then sold on to other abusers. To this day, over 2700 Yazidi women and children are still missing. In 2016, I met for the second time the Yazidi Member of Parliament, Vian Dakhil. She has been trying to draw the world’s attention to the plight of her people. I heard her account of spending time with the families, now in refugee camps, and the descriptions of their experiences. She says it is hard to find words for what happened. There are girls whose young bodies are so torn they will never be able to have a proper family life when they grow into adulthood. In 2019, I went myself to the refugee camps in Northern Iraq where many Yazidi are now sheltering. It broke my heart just listening to the women. Some had borne children but had left them behind in Syria because their Yazidi families could not accept the offspring of such violation and destruction. The tears of these victims were testament to their immeasurable pain.