MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, December 27 (IPS) – Hours earlier than world leaders gathered in Johannesburg for the 2025 G20 summit in November, lots of of South African ladies sporting black lay down in a metropolis park for quarter-hour — one for every lady who loses her life day by day to gender-based violence within the nation. The putting visible protest was organised by a civil society organisation, Ladies for Change, which additionally gathered over one million signatures demanding the federal government declare gender-based violence (GBV) a nationwide catastrophe. Hours later, the federal government acquiesced.
It was a significant victory in a 12 months marked by brutal violence and political backlash. Because the mud settles on the 16 Days of Activism towards Gender-Primarily based Violence marketing campaign – an annual occasion that begins on 25 November, Worldwide Day for the Elimination of Violence Towards Ladies, and ends on 10 December, Human Rights Day – the achievement in South Africa stands in distinction to a worldwide panorama of regression.
The numbers that motivated this 12 months’s mobilisations inform a grim story. In 2024, round 4,000 ladies have been victims of femicides in Latin America alone, amounting to just about 11 gender-related killings a day. Africa has the world’s highest price at three femicides per 100,000 ladies, with South Africa’s numbers off the charts.
All through 2025, ladies took to the streets in response to sustained patterns of violence and femicide instances that shocked society. In Argentina, protests erupted in September following the live-streamed torture and killing of three younger ladies by a drug-trafficking gang. In Brazil, tens of 1000’s mobilised in December after a girl was run over by her ex-boyfriend and dragged throughout concrete for a kilometre, ensuing within the lack of her legs. In Italy, nationwide protests adopted the murders of two 22-year-old college students in April and the killing of a 14-year-old lady by an older boy whose advances she rejected in Could.
These extremely seen instances have been the tip of the iceberg. But they galvanised mobilisations due to many years of civil society groundwork: naming femicide as a definite phenomenon, combating for authorized recognition and creating the databases many governments nonetheless refuse to keep up. This deliberate work of counting the useless has remodeled particular person tragedies into proof of systematic violence, making it unattainable for states to dismiss every killing as an remoted incident.
This sustained stress compelled some governments to behave. In 2025, Spain grew to become a European Union (EU) pioneer in criminalising vicarious violence — violence perpetrated towards ladies by means of intermediaries, sometimes kids or relations. Its new regulation, handed in September, adopted Mexico’s 2023 recognition of this type of abuse. On 25 November, coinciding with Worldwide Day for the Elimination of Violence Towards Ladies, Italy’s parliament handed a regulation making femicide a definite felony offence punishable by life imprisonment. The achievement is all of the extra important on condition that, till 1981, the Italian penal code nonetheless provided leniency for so-called ‘honour killings’.
However progress is fragile. Proper-wing governments that body anti-GBV measures as ideological are shifting to dismantle many years of feminist victories. In Argentina, the right-wing authorities of President Javier Milei has eradicated the Ministry of Ladies, Genders and Variety and introduced plans to dismantle complete sexuality schooling and repeal gender parity in electoral lists, amongst different regressive adjustments.
In Turkey, which deserted the Istanbul Conference – the Council of Europe Conference on stopping and combating violence towards ladies and home violence – in 2021, 1000’s of girls defied sweeping protest bans to demand justice over the suspicious dying of a 21-year-old college pupil in October. In accordance with the We Will Cease Femicide Platform, no less than 235 ladies have been killed by males between January and October, with a further 247 ladies discovered useless in suspicious circumstances. But the right-wing nationalist authorities declared 2025 to be the ‘Yr of the Household’, criticised by activists for reinforcing conventional roles as an alternative of addressing ladies’s security.
And in Latvia, parliament voted to withdraw from the Istanbul Conference, barely a 12 months after ratifying it. Proper-wing events argued it promoted ‘gender theories’ below the guise of combating violence, and proceeded regardless of a petition towards it that gathered over 60,000 signatures. The president despatched the invoice again to parliament for evaluation, but when it passes, Latvia would be the first EU member state to stop the conference.
The 16 Days marketing campaign highlights a elementary fact: violence towards ladies isn’t just a social drawback however a violation of human rights. Its endpoint on Human Rights Day, established to commemorate the adoption of the Common Declaration of Human Rights, asserts that ladies’s rights are human rights and emphasises the demand that states fulfil their obligations below worldwide regulation to forestall, examine and punish GBV.
South Africa’s declaration proves that sustained collective motion can pressure change. Ladies’s rights activists efficiently leveraged the worldwide highlight of the G20 summit, staging a nationwide shutdown that noticed 1000’s withdraw from paid and unpaid labour, chorus from spending cash and lie in silent protest at midday. They compelled the disaster onto the worldwide agenda at a second of unprecedented worldwide consideration.
Assembly even probably the most primary calls for — the power to stroll residence with out worry, depart abusive companions, take part in politics with out risking sexual violence, exist on-line with out harassment — requires structural transformation. Ladies will solely discover security when societies stop to view them as objects to own and management, when these in search of to flee abuse have a path to financial independence, when judicial methods deal with violence towards ladies with the seriousness it deserves and when know-how corporations are held accountable for platforms that allow harassment.
The 12 months revealed extra regression than progress. But amid rising repression and dwindling assets, ladies’s actions persevered in documenting violence, supporting survivors, educating the general public and advocating for systemic change. Their persistence displays a transparent understanding that actual change calls for sustained motion. States have human rights obligations to guard ladies’s lives, and ladies’s actions will proceed to insist these obligations are met with the seriousness and assets they require, one protest at a time.
Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Analysis and Evaluation, co-director and author for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She can be a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.
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