International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women

“We are the Erasmus generation, those belonging to the generation that experienced the equality, human rights and self-development. We come from the future, where everybody has understood the mistakes of the past and have proposed new solutions”.

Theoretically, it is a nice point of view: a world where everybody knows how to defend himself or herself and the others. Unfortunately, there is still a long way to do, based on hard work.

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, a great day to deal with, whatever our biological sex is, because it concerns all of us.

Can we still talk about gender inequality in 2020?

Simply, yes we can. Moreover, yes we must!

This year was particularly complicated because of pandemic: since April 2020, with the lockdown measures, the closure of schools, smart-working, people have been forced to stay home. Countries all around the world have seen a rise of violence against women, especially in domestic places.

But, the numbers were worrying also for the past year: 243 million women abused by an intimate partner all around the world in 2019.

How can we recognize violence? How does it manifest?

We could think, looking at these data, that it is something far from us. Maybe it happens in some other country, maybe in some problematic family. It is not.

Violence against women happens every day, everywhere.

There are some people more at risk than others, for instance lesbians, bisexual transgender, intersex or women (or people) belonging to minorities refugees and others. Nevertheless, these are only some examples.

In general terms, it manifests itself in physical, sexual and psychological forms, encompassing:

intimate partner violence (battering, psychological abuse, marital rape, femicide);
sexual violence and harassment (rape, forced sexual acts, unwanted sexual advances, child sexual abuse, forced marriage, street harassment, stalking, cyber- harassment);
human trafficking (slavery, sexual exploitation);
female genital mutilation; and
child marriage.

Source: https://www.un.org/en/observances/ending-violence-against-women-day

Orange the world: fund, respond, prevent, collect

The UN Women’s Generation Equality slogan aim is to amplify the call for action all around the world, from prevent a simple harassment to improve life-saving services for women and girls.

On the one hand, calls to help-line in some countries have increased five-fold, but, on the other hand, due to Coronavirus pandemic some women stopped reporting domestic violence because they had no opportunity to access to the regular channel.

It is an urgent need, for all of us!

The International Day has become, in 2020, 16 days against women violence, until December the 10th, the International Day of Human Right.

There are many social initiatives: Orange the World on Social Media!

Here you can download banners for your Facebook or Twitter account, while you can use the UN Women’s face filter to support it on Instagram!

Erasmus + supporting the cause

NGOs throughout Europe could not avoid hearing the call.

Many projects about the topic have been realized or are on the way to.

Here are some of them:

RESOLVE: Network Youth Conference 2020

The call for women of Oriel 

ON-OFF Project - Preventing Cyber Gender-based Violence

And many others!

Write me if you also have a project facing this hard topic and you want to be added to this list. You can write me on Instagram, Facebook or here, on Youthreporter