Sixteen days a year to fight a violence that never stops. The UN Women “16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence” campaign launched on 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. It runs through 10 December, Human Rights Day, because the connection is obvious. Violence against women is not a private matter. It is a human rights violation that governments still treat like a sidebar issue.
The slogan this year focuses on prevention. Not awareness. Not sympathy. Prevention. Because a society that reacts only after women are harmed has already failed them. Laws exist. Treaties exist. Hotlines exist. What is missing is safety before the attack, accountability after it, and political will every day in between.
If Women Need a Campaign to Be Safe, the System Has Already Failed
Jessica Ingrée Esq
The scale of the crisis is staggering. Globally, nearly 1 in 3 women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence at least once in their lifetime. One woman or girl is killed by someone she knows every 11 minutes. Digital abuse is rising: between 16 % and 58 % of women and girls report technology-facilitated violence, and nearly half the world’s women lack legal protection from such abuse.
These aren’t numbers to skim past. They’re the silent echo of lives changed forever.
When we think of violence against women, rape and sexual assault often come to mind. They’re urgent, obvious, and horrific. But focusing only on them misses the broader reality. Violence takes many forms. According to UN Women, important categories include intimate partner violence, sexual violence, femicide, human trafficking, female genital mutilation, child marriage and technology-facilitated abuse.
- Intimate partner violence: physical hurt, threats, controlling behaviour inside a relationship or marriage.
- Psychological or emotional abuse: insidious, lasting, hard to detect, but just as damaging.
- Economic abuse: withholding money, preventing work, manipulating finances.
- Cyber-violence: stalking, harassment, online image-based abuse, all of which carry real world consequences.
- Structural violence: forced marriage, trafficking, FGM, state neglect in humanitarian crises.
If the world only spots the most dramatic cases, the rest continues unchecked. Emotional harm, financial shackles, digital terror, they’re still violence.
This campaign reminds the world that ending gender-based violence is not an NGO hobby. It requires criminal justice systems that treat women’s lives as non-negotiable. It requires schools that teach boys early that power is not a license to harm. It requires funding. Real funding. Not lip service disguised as “resource constraints.”
UN Women uses orange as the campaign color. Bright, visible, impossible to ignore. The point is to make resistance just as visible. To make solidarity public. To turn private pain into global accountability.
If governments want to prove they take gender equality seriously, they can start with one simple measure. When a woman asks for protection, she should not have to die to prove she needed it.
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