16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence.

On 25 November 2004, residents of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, walked the city's streets distributing white ribbons, leaflets and postcards during a public march organized by Gender and Development for Cambodia to raise awareness of violence against women. In India that evening, members of the Mumbai Violence Against Women Group held a musical concert called "Shades of Courage", immediately followed by a night-long workshop for women on violence in public spaces. At the same time nearly 9,000 miles away in the United States, the Palm Beach County Florida Working Group held a memorial breakfast and hung T-shirts bearing messages of women's experiences with violence on a clothes-line display. While Women's Aid gathered people outside the Parliament building in Ireland for a moment of silence to honour women victims of violence, the Southern Africa Media and Gender Institute prepared to hold a workshop with journalists on the portrayal of such violence in the media.

From a youth seminar in Nigeria planned by BAOBAB to an afternoon of entertainment in Jamaica hosted by the Sistren Theater Collective, from a candle-lighting ceremony in Finland organized by a coalition of women's rights groups to a video forum in Colombia arranged by Profamilia, hundreds of organizations around the world were observing the opening of the annual 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign. An international campaign occuring every year from 25 November to 10 December, the idea was conceived in 1991 at the first annual Women's Global Leadership Institute (WGLI), sponsored by the Center for Women's Global Leadership (CWGL). Participants--23 women activists--created the 16 Days Campaign to raise global awareness that violence against women is a violation of human rights. They chose dates that would symbolically link violence against women and human rights: 25 November is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, and 10 December is International Human Rights Day.

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Lori Michau, co-Director of Raising Voices, an organization in Uganda working to create and promote community-based approaches to preventing violence against women and children, emphasizes the importance of the human rights framework to the 16 Days Campaign: "A human rights framework insists that efforts to prevent violence against women are rooted in the struggle for their human rights and not seen as depending on the kindness or benevolence of men. It reinforces the empowerment and agency of women and asserts their worth as human beings. It holds the entire community accountable to a vision of equity and justice."

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The Campaign also encompasses other important dates, such as 1 December--World AIDS Day--and 6 December--the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, in which a male student at the University of Montreal in Canada murdered fourteen female engineering students whom he blamed for his academic failures. Since the Campaign's inception, CWGL, which is based at Rutgers University in the United States, has documented the participation of over 2,000 organizations in 137 countries.

During the campaign, organizations around the world from the grass-roots to international levels plan innovative activities to educate people on the nature and extent of the global problem of violence against women, as well as the movement against it. Srichandra Venkataramanan of Swadhina, a women's and children's organization in India, says: "The key to any form of activism is to make the people and the society aware that there is a problem and that the solution lies in us ... the [16 Days] Campaign against Gender Violence has helped us to make people aware that violence against women is not a social norm and that the entire world is today in an active campaign to end violence against women."

Historically, the Campaign has been instrumental in using a human rights framework to draw global attention to violence against women. In its early years (1991-1992), 16 Days activists initiated a worldwide petition calling for the United Nations to place women's human rights issues on the agenda of the June 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, Austria. By the time of the Conference, the petition had collected half a million signatures in 23 languages from 124 countries and had helped secure a formal statement in the Vienna Declaration of women's rights as human rights and of violence against women as a human rights violation. In 1999, the Campaign was part of successful efforts to urge the United Nations to declare 25 November as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. However, without the efforts of local organizers at the grass-roots level, such international victories would not have been possible.

Frances Abouzeid, Project Director of Freedom House in Jordan, points to the importance of connecting various target groups working at different levels to eliminate gender-based violence: "There is demonstrated political will from the top here in Jordan ... and this helps open the door. But the key to the 16 Days Campaign is the collaboration of different governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and academic and media groups getting involved to address the issue of violence against women. Marrying this grassroots effort with the push from the top will help to change things." Mr. Abouzeid says that Freedom House experienced this kind of success with an event in which actors in an interactive play on violence against women engaged an audience in a dialogue. It was co-sponsored by Amnesty International's Middle East programme on the issue.

Local 16 Days Campaign organizers around the globe use innovative methods such as those of Freedom House to raise visibility within their communities of the problem and efforts to combat it. Many organizations employ various forms of entertainment and the media to reach as large an audience as possible. For example. Amnesty International's Caribbean team broadcast a series of radio announcements throughout the region, including an anti-violence version of Bob Marley's "No Woman, No Cry". There are also numerous groups using modern technologies to reach vast audiences. In South Africa, Women's Net hosted daily cyber-dialogues on a different violence-centred topic each day. In many cases, donor organizations step up to help grass-roots groups make their 16 Days plans a reality.

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United Kingdom-based WOMANKIND Worldwide, which has been awarding small grants to African women's organizations since 2000, according to its programme officer Ceri Hayes, "sees the 16 Days of Activism as an important opportunity to profile and lend support to the amazing efforts of women's organizations around the world who share the goal of ending violence against women". Efforts by 16 Days activists have had enormous success in changing social attitudes that lead to violence and in pushing Governments to address the problem. The Campaign has become so renowned that South African President Thabo Mbeki and other national government officials participated in its opening ceremonies. In Fiji, the Campaign has been part of a collection of lobbying efforts that have resulted in the Government's current work on domestic violence legislation. Despite successes in implementing new legislation, changing public attitudes and increasing services to survivors, there is still much to be done as violence against women remains a major human rights violation, an obstacle to world development and a global public health crisis.

The theme for the 2004 and 2005 16 Days campaigns--For the Health of Women, for the Health of the World: No More Violence--centred on addressing the multiple intersections between violence against women and women's health, with a particular focus on HIV/AIDS. The theme aims to emphasize that specific attention must be paid to the issue in order to effectively deal with the HIV/AIDS crisis. Such gender-based violence, especially forced or coerced sex, increases women's vulnerability to HIV infection. There is also a growing body of research calling attention to the connection between violence against women and the disease. The fear of violence associated with gender discrimination and the stigma that often comes with being HIV-positive can dissuade women from seeking information on the disease, getting tested, disclosing their HIV-status and seeking treatment and counselling. It also limits a woman's ability to negotiate safe sexual behaviour, even in a consensual union, and those who are perceived to be HIV-infected may face violence and/or abandonment. Since violence can affect their willingness to be tested, it can also have a detrimental effect on wide-ranging HIV control, treatment and prevention programmes.

Hopefully, 16 Days participants working with the current theme will enhance dialogue and call attention to the vibrant activist efforts already focused on the issue. To this end, CWGL is raising the visibility of such connections through collaboration with the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), Amnesty International, the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS, the Global Campaign for Microbicides, and the World Health Organization as a co-convenor of the violence against women sub-group of the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

Another fundamental purpose of the 16 Days Campaign is to elevate political will, urging Governments to put resources behind international agreements to make their language a reality. The 2004 campaign materials encouraged participants to consider several upcoming anniversaries as important opportunities to remind Governments of the commitments they have made in addressing the issues of violence against women and HIV/AIDS. These include the ten-year review of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and the five-year review of the Millennium Declaration, both scheduled in 2005, as well as the five-year review of the United Nations General Assembly special session on HIV and AIDS in 2006.

But most important to the Campaign are the organizations that plan events to reach people in their local communities where change takes root. The 2004 international calendar of activities has documented groups working on issues such as reproductive and sexual health and rights, violence against women and HIV/AIDS, collaborating on a wide array of events, including:

* a public forum on gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS by the Federated States of Micronesia Women's Association Network;

* the distribution of action and advocacy packs on violence against women and HIV/AIDS by the Gender-Based Violence Prevention Network of the Horn, East and Southern Africa;

* a discussion for professionals working at battered women's shelters on the links between gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS by Creacion Positiva in Spain;

* a drama festival organized by the Center for Domestic Violence Prevention in Kampala, Uganda, which brought together more than ten community groups that had created their own dramas, songs, poems and traditional dances about women's vulnerability to HIV/AIDS as a result of violence;

* the creation and distribution of materials, such as pens, key chains and bags inscribed with the 2004 16 Days theme, as well as calendars made up of postcards with messages regarding violence against women and HIV/AIDS by the UNIFEM regional office for Mexico, Central America, Cuba and the Dominican Republic;

* the release by the Alan Guttmacher Institute in the United States of a special issue of "International Family Planning Perspectives", a periodic publication on gender-based violence; and

* a men's travel conference within Kenya to educate communities on the issues of violence against women and HIV/AIDS, by the Nairobi Environmental Network Initiative.

The 16 Days Campaign was conceived fourteen years ago by a group of creative, intelligent, passionate women leaders, visionaries from diverse parts of the globe working on violence at various levels. These 23 women returned to their home countries following the 1991 WGLI and planted the seeds of an anti-violence movement that has been relentless in its demand for a world free of violence against women. The Campaign has since taken on a life of its own outside the CWGL where it was born. Its message has been passed through words, websites, fliers, art exhibits, radio shows, seminars and rallies, and on billboards, buses and stages, so that there is hardly a place in the world where people do not know its meaning. The momentum continues to grow, promising a day when the global struggle for an end to violence against women will no longer be necessary.

"Violence against women is perhaps the most shameful human rights
violation, and it is perhaps the most pervasive. It knows no boundaries
of geography, culture or wealth. As long as it continues, we cannot
claim to be making real progress towards equality, development and
peace.
--Secretary-General Kofi Annan

For more information, including an international calendar of activities, please visit http://www.cwgl.rutgers.edu/16days/home.html.

Sara Nordstrom is Campaign Coordinator for the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence at the Center for Women's Global Leadership. She has worked with women's human rights organizations in the United States and Ghana.

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