16 DAYS OF ACTIVISM

The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence is not a calendar mark. It is a reckoning. It begins on November 25, the day the world is asked to recognize what so many of us live with every single day—the terror, the violation, the ways our bodies and minds are violated because of our gender. It stretches to December 10, a reminder that rights exist on paper, but too often not in life. It began in 1991, when activists dared to name what most refuse to see: violence against women, girls, and gender-diverse people is a global crisis.

I know it from the inside. I know what it is to shrink into corners, to flinch at a shadow, to hear a voice in my head repeating the moment when control was stolen. I know what it is to fear the world and still keep walking through it. I survived. But survival is not enough. Every scar, every memory, every waking heartbeat carries responsibility. I speak because silence is complicity. I create, I teach, I stand in rooms where people would rather look away, because visibility is the only weapon against erasure.

The 16 Days are not gentle. They are brutal. They demand we see the violence that hides in homes, in workplaces, online, in silence. They demand we see the systems that protect abusers and punish survivors. They demand we fight, with words, with action, with truth. Workshops, public art, conversations, marches—they are not symbolic. They are lifelines. They are ways to turn fear into strategy, grief into solidarity, trauma into advocacy.

For survivors, for allies, for anyone who refuses to look away, the 16 Days are a call. Stand. Speak. Act. Do not let the violence be invisible. Do not let the world forget us. We are here. We are counted. We demand change. And we will keep demanding it until every body, every life, every voice is safe.