“I asked the commissioner what the U.N. could do about the situation in Pakistan. The response I got was shocking because I was told that ‘It’s a matter of your government,’” says Ahmed.

Ahmed says she realized that the resources for victims in Pakistan were limited.

Ahmed began to hear a number of accounts of sexual abuse—including from her friends.

She soon entered into a dialogue with some of the victims, spawning her own sexual assault support group.

In the summer of her junior year of high school, Ahmed interned at Handicap International in Pakistan.

There, Ahmed had the chance to work with a cluster of organizations dealing with a refugee crisis in Pakistan.

But at the time, she says, these organizations placed little emphasis on fighting the trafficking of women. So Ahmed proposed that they make a separate working group for them—and they were convinced.

GROWING TRAFFIC

Since further development of the website and its resources require money, Ahmed has begun planning a fundraiser at Harvard that she hopes to launch in the fall of 2011.

Currently, Ahmed has Pakistani volunteers working to get her website advertised on primetime television in Pakistan, and she is trying to fundraise to pay for posters to advertise her website at Pakistani universities.

They are also helping her translate the website into Urdu.

A recent Facebook page has already received nearly 400 followers.

The increase in traffic to her website has attracted Ahmed’s friends and former support group members into helping her administer the website and answer emails from abuse victims.

Ahmed says she and her team work around the clock to ensure that no cry for help goes unanswered.

“I personally know of cases where people have emailed larger organizations where they were never replied to,” she says. “In my work, I don’t trade off quality for quantity.”

The classes she has taken while at Harvard, such as Science of Living Systems 17 and Computer Science 1, have helped her, she says, with understanding everything from psychological aspects of trauma to developing the coding for her website.

And as the publicity director for the Harvard Undergraduate Legal Committee, she says she has gained valuable experience as she now promotes her services and her website.

She says her connections at Harvard—including her roommate Karolina M. Dos Santos ’14—have also provided support.

“For every idea Rabeea [Ahmed] presents me, I try to troubleshoot possible problems that could arise and we work together on how to solve them,” says Dos Santos.

“I’m so proud of Rabeea because she is applying the knowledge she’s gained from the classroom to help hundreds of people.”