Slightly under a year ago, I published “Adrift in an Ocean of Days”, the starting point for which was the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (VAW), marked on 25 November, which is today (it still is, in French time). It is a day marked by feminist activists since the beginning of the 1980s: it marks the 1960 assassination by order of Dominican ruler Rafael Trujillo of three sisters, Patria, Minerva and María Teresa Mirabal, who were activists against his dictatorship. The UN General Assembly (UNGA) passed Resolution 48/104 on the elimination of VAW on 20 December 1993, but did not officialise 25 November as The day until it adopted Resolution 54/134 on 7 February 2000—the same year, incidentally, as the UN Security Council (UNSC) passed Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (on 31 October).
That is a lot of dates and numbers and initialisms, enough to bamboozle even the most attentive of readers. Yet we really do need to pay attention, because neither UNGA 48/104 nor UNSC 1325 have translated significantly into action, even though 54/134 (the resolution adopting the actual day) is now marked with much fanfare worldwide by institutions and activists alike. In other words, like so many laws and initiatives and political speeches about taking VAW seriously, whether at UN level or at the level of member states, these documents are, as the (misquoted) Shakespearean[1] saying goes, honoured more in their breach than their observance. That said, UNGA resolutions are not legally binding, so to talk of breaching them is somewhat of a logical non-sequitur. As for UNSC ones, a 1971 advisory opinion of the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) asserted that they were legally binding. (For all the good that does women seeking to participate in post-conflict negotiations and governance under the terms of UNSC 1325.)
However, whatever the legal status of all these resolutions, they do carry significant moral weight, and are frequently invoked as reference points by governments and, more often, by civil society activists.
So, we have a UN Day. Since 2000. On the elimination of VAW. As for the 16 days of activism against VAW, they were initiated by the first Global Women’s Leadership Institute, held in 1991 by the Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL), itself founded in 1989 by Charlotte Bunch at Rutgers University, where she holds a professorship. Bunch and the CWGL have long lobbied the UN on women’s human rights and her collection of essays Passionate Politics is a staple on many women’s studies and feminist bookshelves. Personally I’m not so much into that whole leadership thing. I’ve always found “leadership” to be a fairly poisonous concept for women. But hey, this was the US, and this was a woman and a group dedicated to working with and within international institutions, for whom the language of leadership is intelligible, whereas the language of feminism often isn’t. Not in the ways we would like it to be, anyway.
The sound and the fury
Yes, there I go, referencing Shakespeare again (or William Faulkner if you prefer). The expression comes from the eponymous hero’s (antihero’s?) second soliloquy in That Scottish Play (you know, the one that’s bad luck to mention in a theatre, which I’ve always thought would be awkward for people actually presenting it). Here is how it goes:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
Now, far be it from me to suggest that the “life” of activism against VAW is “a tale told by an idiot”—although given the idiotic things often said about it by men, one wonders—but the “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” does darkly point to institutional inaction on the matter. This is notwithstanding all the sound that the institutions make and all the fury of women who every year, and not just in November, get up and shout about it. Which points me to another reference linked to the above soliloquy, from Phoebe Snow’s celebrated 1975 song “Harpo’s Blues”:
I strut and fret
My hour upon the stage
The hour is up
I have to run and hide my rage
Indeed. Otherwise we would all surely explode. It is a rage that is all the more difficult to contain when one considers the figure I used for today’s main title. That is the percentage figure of the annual decline in VAW worldwide over the last two decades, according to a 2023 report by the World Health Organization (WHO). That is, a glacially slow rate. It is also the percentage of all official aid and development funding that is dedicated to combating VAW, and less than one percent of all official aid funding goes to women’s rights organisations.
We know, through the oft-repeated statistic produced by UN women, that one woman is killed every ten minutes somewhere in the world by a man she knows. An estimated 840 million women (that is, females aged 15 or over) have experienced partner or sexual violence during their lifetime, and given the woefully low level of reporting, the actual figure is probably higher. In any case, we’re talking around one in three women. At least. And this figure has not shifted in decades. Notwithstanding international Days.
But this is not just a “aid” or “development” issue. In the so-called developed world, governments are appallingly bad at tracking spending on programmes to end VAW and often underspend the (already insufficient) allocated budget for this purpose. In the UK, for example, a January, 2025 report by the National Audit office showed that the Home Office consistently underspent its own budget allocated to ending VAW by up to 15 percent.
As for France, when first elected in 2017, the now increasingly despised president Emmanuel Macron pledged to make combating VAW the grand cause of his first mandate. In 2023, over three women per week were victim of femicide in France and almost one per day suffered attempted femicide, while double that latter number either suicided or attempted suicide as a result of violence by a current or former partner. In 2024, the rate of femicide actually increased by 11 percent, and most feminist associations have seen their funding dwindle over the years: 70 percent of them lost funding again in 2024. Also in 2024, the overwhelming majority of rape cases (some 94 percent) did not even proceed to trial although those that did, thanks to consciousness-raising through #Metoo, did result in a reasonable rate of conviction. Still, not a brilliant outcome for French women: this is the least one can say. And that gets French women pretty damn riled. In July this year, the Amazones d’Avignon spray painted the route of the Tour de France with names of 170 women killed by partners or ex partners between 2023 and 2025, along with outlines of bodies, and the words “Stop Femicide”.
Yep, take a bow Emperor Choupinet (or Big Mac if you prefer, another of his nicknames), you’ve done a really great job of tackling VAW.[2] (Not.)
We also have the ongoing and immensely irritating problem in Australia of trans-identified males mansplaining VAW to us. For example, Respect Victoria (a state government agency) today published an appalling video of one such individual, very obviously male, telling us all about how “cis” women and trans “women” need to work together to combat “gender”-based violence. Yeah, right. Maybe we should compare the government and philanthropic funding that goes to trans lobbies and that which goes to women’s organisations combating VAW. And once we’ve uncovered that egregious imbalance (especially relative to numbers of people concerned), then go about redressing it. Now, that might just get us somewhere. In the meantime, we have to deal with this sort of absurd propaganda which, were it not so damaging to the cause of advancing women’s and girl’s rights, would be laughable.
Oh, and if the officially-titled Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody would get off her trans battlehorse for a second or three and stop putting so much zeal into things like trying to get Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, its causes and consequences, removed from office, turning rather to doing the job for which she was appointed in the first place (addressing sex discrimination against women) that would be grand indeed.[3] Alsalem has been outspoken and brave in her defence of women’s sex-based rights, in all areas. She has produced reports on surrogacy, prostitution, sexual violence against women, and of course, the correct interpretation of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW, 1979). But Anna Cody wants to get rid of her. Yep, pretty hard to refrain from exploding in fury.
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Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
So, in this “creeping petty pace” in the “day to day” of women’s lives, we continue to pick our way across the minefields, too often unable to stop the buried bombs blowing up in our faces.
Such as the one that hit Kamilaroi and Mununjali woman Kardell Lomas in Ipswich, Queensland, in early December 2019. In 2023, the bloke who killed her, Traven Fisher, was sentenced to fourteen years for manslaughter. That is the sentence you get when you don’t intend to do harm. Yet, Lomas had repeatedly sought help from police and support services in the months before her murder. Shockingly, the coroner “declined to hold an inquest because ‘there does not appear to be any prospect of making recommendations that would reduce the likelihood of similar passings occurring in future’” (quoted in The Guardian, 19 November). Yes, the coroner really did use that coy euphemism. Not death. “Passing”.
The non-inquest findings were finally published in October 2025 and Lomas’s family are now seeking an answer to the question: “why was there no inquest?”. Indigenous women in Australia are seven times more likely to die from intimate partner femicide (The Guardian article used the term “homicide”) and their complaints are taken far less seriously by police. They are also far less likely to place trust in police and social services because of systemic sexualised racism.
Yet we are told that governments are working on VAW. Budgets get allocated, Special People get appointed to be In Charge of Doing Something. And still it gets worse. Let us hope that it will not continue until “the last syllable of recorded time”.
It is certainly not for want of us trying. Shouting. Screaming. Spraypainting highways.
Zero point two. Surely women’s lives are worth more than that.
[1] For Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that breach was rather a positive thing: he referred to customs that really should be breached. In common parlance, however, the phrase has come to mean the opposite: that the breach is in fact a failure.
[2] Choupinet the First was a mocking nickname given to Macron after his first election in 2017, because he was so young and yet so arrogant. Shortly after that, he likened himself to Jupiter and was much mocked because of it. He is also frequently caricatured as Emperor Napoleon.
[3] Emails from Cody’s office leaked to the daily The Australian clearly show her enquiring about what role the Australian government could play in getting extension of Alsalem’s mandate blocked.
