In June 1984, together with her daughter Anna and her partner, Sandy, Raffles set off to make the journey across the Soviet Union on the trans-Siberian railway to China. The two women spent over twelve months travelling and also visited Tibet, India, Hong Kong and the Philippines. Throughout this period she was taking many photographs, recording women's lives and work. On her return to Scotland she began to select work from her travels for future exhibition. Back in Edinburgh in the summer of 1985 Raffles returned to working as a self-employed photographer. She continued building a portfolio of educational, community-based, charity and campaign project work. In November 1985 she travelled to Mexico on a commission for The Mercury Gallery. In 1986 she carried out a project commissioned by Edinburgh District Council featuring the women athletes in the 13th Commonwealth Games held in Edinburgh. This resulted in an exhibition entitled "Simply Women" which toured community venues across the city"." From then on she was attached to projects developed through Edinburgh District Council's Women's Committee and documented all aspects of the work of the Committee. In 1987/88 this included the booklet and touring exhibition "To Let you Understand" about women's lives and work across the city. In 1989 Raffles' work was included in The Stills Gallery Touring Exhibition "Picturing Women."" "She also continued to plan international projects and spent time in Dominica and in the Soviet Union. In 1990 an exhibition of photographs taken in Russia, Georgia and the Ukraine, "Women Workers," was shown in Glasgow and Rostov-on-Don, Russia. From 1991 Raffles worked, with Evelyn Gillan and a small team of other women, to establish the charity "Zero Tolerance," to raise awareness of male violence against women. She was responsible for creating the images used in the early campaigns which were launched to great acclaim in Edinburgh and were then taken up by local authorities across the UK and abroad. At this time she was awarded funding as a Wingate Trust Scholar to undertake a documentary project, entitled "Lot’s Wife," working with immigrant Jewish women, from the former Soviet Union, who had been resettled in Israel". "She visited Israel a number of times to carry out this project which investigated ideas of family, identity, and religion. In the autumn of 1994 she was completing the selection of images and editing interviews she had carried out with the Russian Jewish women. Raffles died on 6 December 1994 as a result of complications after giving birth to twin daughters. A retrospective exhibition of her work, "Observing Women at Work", was held at the Glasgow School of Art from 4 March to 27 April 2017.