In the best of circumstances, it is a challenge to travel hundreds of miles across the barren desert of Chad to the Darfur region of Sudan. Stefanie Frease knew this when she told State Department representatives in the summer of 2004 that, with little more than a month of advance warning, she could oversee a survey of a thousand war-ravaged refugees from Darfur. The refugees had escaped to UN camps across the border in neighboring Chad. More than 200,000 Darfurian refugees huddled there under straggly trees and plastic tarps as they struggled to survive the loss of family members and most of their meager possessions.

Frease was only in her middle thirties, but she was already a veteran human rights investigator, having uncovered the evidence that convicted a Serbian general of genocide at Srebrenica. Yet, Africa was a whole new story. Within a month she supervised the collection of several hundred interviews that formed the basis for Secretary of State Powell's testimony before the UN Security Council. Within two months, her team supplied Powell with a sample of more than one thousand interviews from what criminologists call a victimization survey.