In two weeks, the director of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, Ms Olive Braiden, and at least one senior counsellor will travel to the Kosovan refugee camps in Albania.
Initially, they will assess the needs of women who require counselling for rape and abuse and from this information will draw up a programme for training medical staff and aid workers already helping refugees. They expect to travel on the weekend of May 15th, around the arrival time in Ireland of some 150 refugees, the first of an expected 1,000.
The DRCC mission has the blessing and some financial support from the Department of Foreign Affairs. A successful precedent was set in the Balkans in 1993 when the DRCC approached Mr Dick Spring, the then minister for foreign affairs, who sponsored a similar operation in Bosnia. It led to strong contacts and training programmes which included a number of short residential courses here.
Ms Braiden says they will visit the more settled camps first. "Refugees have so many urgent problems and worries it is only when they relax a bit that they have time to deal with traumas such as rape and assault. It is very important that such issues are treated with great sensitivity and confidentiality.
"We have been in contact with some of the aid agencies who feel the need for people with experience, who are skilled in knowing when it is time simply to listen or when further steps should be taken, such as telling their families. Many are terrified of anybody finding out. It is women, children and the frail who are usually worst affected."
Last Thursday night, Ms Angela McCarthy, a DRCC counsellor, who has worked in Bosnia and has recently returned from Albania, told a Dublin meeting of the reports which she had heard from a variety of sources.
"You hear stories of rape of women, boys and young men. You hear of Serb soldiers or police who have grabbed groups of young girls and taken them to their camps where they are also forced to do hard physical work. You hear of groups of women who are taken into woods near the borders and who return bruised and silent.
"The cultural climate surrounding rape is still ambiguous in many countries but it is very shameful in Kosovo. It is considered to be a great shame for married women, for young girls who are virgins and for the men who feel ashamed that they cannot or have not protected them."
She told some 40 people at a public meeting held by the Ireland Kosovo Solidarity Group she felt they were "just picking up the tip of the iceberg".
"It is a trauma over all the other traumas. It is shame, violation, humiliation, compounding the feeling that their lives are in ruins, that they have somehow further dishonoured their families and put in the context of losing their homes and jobs, that it is somehow self-indulgent to feel the need to talk about rape."