Awareness
Content Warning: this article contains a discussion of gender-based violence, violence against children, sexual violence, other specific types of violence, and death. Please take care of yourself if you choose to read.
November 25th is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, a day that has become excruciatingly relevant in recent years and, indeed, the last few weeks. We take this day to rally for the eradication of gender-based violence of all kinds across the globe and to raise awareness of the pervasiveness of said violence, which is so widespread and insidious that the United Nations and other such influential organizations have described it as a ‘Pandemic.’
The date of November 25th was chosen to commemorate the 1960 assassinations of the three Mirabal sisters, courageous political activists from the Dominican Republic whose deaths were ordered by the then-dictator of the nation. It was first marked in 1981 by activists at the first Encuentros Feministas Latinoamericanas y del Caribe (en: Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encuentros) in Bogotá and would later receive its official UN Resolution on February 7th, 2000. It has since been adopted as an important occasion around the globe, with organizations like the United Nations
The day also marks the start of the Sixteen Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, which serves to highlight the violence that is directed not only toward women but all those of a marginalized gender. These days are observed until Human Rights Day on December 10th, which marks the moment in 1948 that the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; a monumental document of its time that still influences the fight for equal rights to this day.
Here in Canada, the Sixteen Days also include December 6th, the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. That day serves to remind us of the events of December 6th, 1989, when tragedy struck École Polytechnique de Montréal, and 14 women were massacred in a deeply misogynistic act of violence by a man who claimed he was ‘fighting feminism.’ What happened at École Polytechnique shook the country, and every year we as Canadians take the opportunity to not only remind ourselves of these horrible events but also to re-commit ourselves to ensure such an act of gender-based hatred never happens again.
Violence against women takes countless forms across all stages of a woman’s life, and statistics indicate that one in three women around the world will face gender-based violence in their lives. In 2023, at least fifty-one thousand women died due to gender-based violence, which means a woman was murdered once every ten minutes for the entire year. That number is unimaginably terrible, and yet those tragic losses are only one facet of the epidemic of violence that faces women around the globe. The UN defines violence against women as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.”
To be a little more specific, The Gender Equality Commission of the Council of Europe has defined nine types of violence against women, categorizing them not based on stage of life or period, but by social context. They are: ‘Violence within the family or domestic violence,’ ’Rape and sexual violence,’ ‘Sexual harassment,’ ’Violence in institutional environments,’ ’Female genital mutilation,’ ‘Forced marriages,’ ‘Violence in conflict and post-conflict situations,’ ‘Killings in the name of honour,’ and ‘Failure to respect freedom of choice concerning reproduction.’
Gender-based violence has an incredibly old history that casts its shadow across the entire earth and can be perpetrated both by individuals and by societies. Both the Witch trials and the sexual slavery forced on the ‘comfort women’ were acts of state-sponsored violence against women, but they are by no means alone in that distinction and are by no means relics of the past. The International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women serves to remind us of this fact, and while the amount of progress we may have made so far might seem frighteningly small, and the length we still have to go might be overwhelmingly large, the day also calls upon us to fully commit ourselves to the fight until all of us are guaranteed a safe, secure, joyful life.
