The demonstration against violence against women in Rome November 25th 2016.
Women in Latin America established November 25th as an international day to challenge violence against women in 1981: the date commemorates the assassination of the Mirabal sisters by the government of the Dominican Republic in 1960. Simultaneously the first Women's Global Leadership Institute in 1991, coordinated by the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University, brought together activists from across the globe. Together they expanded the idea to 16 days of action, beginning on November 25th and ending on December 10th - World Human Rights Day. This linkage was one element in what would become an astonishingly successful campaign to locate violence against women within human rights thinking, policy and practice. Now, with that connection widely accepted, it is difficult to call to mind what a challenge this was to traditional human rights thinking, understood as protecting people from the powers of the state. What feminists demanded was that the UN and states recognise that for women their rights to bodily integrity and life were most often violated in the private sphere, and that states were systematically failing to protect them. The first 16 days campaign launched a global petition to recognise women’s rights as human rights, with VAW a key focus. The target was the United Nations World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993. The global coalition was so effective that the historic Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women was adopted by the UN at that meeting. The UN itself recognised November 25th in 1999, and this year called on member states to ‘turn the world orange’.
2016 is the 25th anniversary of the 16 Days. Globally thousands of meetings, marches and cultural events have been organised, only some of which are recorded here. Perhaps the most stunning was in Italy where women’s organisations mobilised 200,000 people to march in Rome, a historic event largely unmarked by the international media.
