Happily for the civilised world, the 2018 Nobel Peace prize has gone to the richly deserving. And not, one feels inclined to add, to such fatuous worthies as Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un ~ touted by bookies as potential winners.

The prize will be shared by Denis Mukwege of the Congo and Nadia Murad of Iraq, siblings together in the struggle against sexual violence in two very different parts of the world. Nadia personifies the fight for traumatised Yazidis, having been captured in August 2014 by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and sold into sexual slavery.

She was targeted primarily because her family belonged to the minority Yazidi faith. The award, therefore, carries a pregnant message to the Caliphate, which had germinated in Iraq around the time she was abducted. On Friday, she was rewarded by the Nobel committee for her privation, most particularly her struggle against the trials and tribulations in a tormented swathe of the world, not to forget the repeated rapes and months of torture until one captor left a door unlocked.

She is extraordinarily brave, and her courage is reinforced by dignity and clarity of purpose. Remarkably evocative is the title of her autobiography, The Last Girl, a memoir that was crafted with the hope that her doughty campaign would ensure that she is “the last girl in the world with a story like mine”.

Like Malala Yousufzai, the earlier recipient of the Peace Nobel, she has underlined the need to countenance the moral degeneration of extremist groups. She has focused on support for survivors, and a long-term search for justice. This has been couched with an appeal to the world to collect and preserve evidence that would allow ISIS militants to be brought to trial. It has proved a long and often thankless campaign. More accurately, it wasn’t really so thankless after all, as the recognition by the Swedish Academy reaffirms.

The choice of both Nadia and Denis Mukwege, a gynaecologist in the Democratic Republic of Congo, by the Nobel Committee will hearten campaigners against sexual violence. Both have won the Nobel “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict”, to summon the words of the citation.

As a gynaecologist, Mukwege has cared for tens of thousands of women who suffered sexual assault in the Congo’s recurrent civil conflict. He survived a kidnapping attempt in 2012 but has continued his work nonetheless. Both Nadia and Mukwege are credited with sterling achievements that many human rights activists would be proud of, but few able to claim.

This year’s peace prize comes amidst heightened attention to the sexual abuse of women in war, in the workplace, and in society. The Nobel award 2018 celebrates their extraordinary courage and phenomenal work for women everywhere. Both have struggled against the odds.