Why 16 days could help make the world a safer place for women

But this wasn’t the start of the story of 16 Days. The annual burst of intensive campaigning was first established by a group of women in New Jersey in 1991, motivated by the explicitly anti-feminist murder of 14 women in Montreal on December 6 1989. The opening date of November 25 was inspired by women in South America, who had recognised the date since 1981 in commemoration of the 1961 political assassination of three women in the Dominican Republic.

This sparked an international grassroots campaign which built solidarity and awareness of the global epidemic of violence against women. Now, 20 years after the UN officially recognised the campaign, countless activities have been organised in Scotland under the banner of the 16 Days of Activism.

The movement has grown exponentially, and yet the issues it set out to challenge remain. For those who have been involved in the frontlines of this activism, how much has changed and how much has stayed the same?

Lily Greenan, who provides freelance consultancy on violence against women after working as director of Scottish Women’s Aid from 2006 to 2015, began a lifetime of feminist activism in 1981. Becoming a volunteer for Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) was not something Greenan actively sought out. In fact, she drifted into it after a friend asked her to go along with her. “I thought ‘why not?’, as I had nothing else to do and there was nothing good on the telly,” she recalls.

From there, she started her career working with ERCC and later chaired the first multi-agency partnership on violence against women in Edinburgh and had a key role in the development of the Scottish Rape Crisis Network, which was established in 1994.

That was the same year that Greenan, along with many other feminist activists, ran the first International Day of Protest against Violence against Women in Scotland. This title, which has changed over time, reflects some of the difference that Greenan now feels in how the campaign is approached.

“In 1994 we called it a day of protest, because it was built on the back of the murder of 14 women. We did awareness-raising, we did marches, we did Reclaim the Night walks,” she says.

“Some of these still go on – I’m not saying nobody is protesting – but nowadays I see organisations using the ‘16 Days’ to talk about services. This might be controversial, but 16 Days isn’t about services ... it’s about protesting that this happens. Some of that has been lost. We need to put the protest back into it.”

Of course, Greenan acknowledges, many of the issues which women were protesting in the 1990s have since been responded to by political action.

SCOTTISH campaigners began recognising 16 Days of Activism in its entirety in 1998, just in time for the launch of the Scottish Parliament the following year. And in September 1999, former Labour MSP and founding member of Ross-shire Women’s Aid Maureen McMillan introduced one of the earliest members’ debates at Holyrood on the topic of violence against women.

The next month, then communities minister Jackie Baillie – the first Scottish minister responsible for addressing gender-based violence – also introduced a debate on domestic abuse, in the context of the work that was already underway on producing a national strategy on the issue.

“I was in the gallery that day with many other activists,” Greenan remembers. “The gallery was packed – I’ve never seen it that packed, and the chamber was full. It was a very different feeling than it is now.”

At the time, Holyrood was alive with the thrill of hope and the promise of real change. In many ways, this promise was fulfilled. “It felt like that parliament could really make a difference on these issues, which were by default devolved. And in relation to violence against women the developments in Scotland have been huge in the last 20 years. We stand in a very different landscape now,” Greenan says.

Among those changes were the introduction of specialist domestic abuse courts, prosecutors and police, recognition of the impact of violence against women on children, the creation of perpetrator programmes, and considerable improvements in the funding of rape crisis services.

In Greenan’s view, the creation of the new parliament had a major role to play in enabling this progress. “There was a lot less of a ‘them’ and ‘us’ – they were us. There were a lot of people elected to that parliament who were, if not activists in the capital R radical sense, they were involved in grassroots community work.”

All of these improvements notwithstanding, Greenan says that there is a long way to go on addressing the heart of the problem. “I’m 60 and the level of abuse I see young women facing appals me. We have to provide services but the running thread is that men think they have the right to demand things of women. We need more men to step up to say I don’t like this and I don’t want other men to do it.”

Dr Marsha Scott, chief executive of Scottish Women’s Aid since 2015, says that 16 Days of Activism is an important time to reflect on “the road travelled”, while also remembering that “complacency is a constant danger that we must guard against”.

Scott grew up in New Hampshire in the United States in a single-mother household. “My experience in my family showed me from the earliest age that the world was not a fair place for women,” she says. At university, she became aware of the body of evidence in support of this view, which allowed her to “move from a sense of injustice to one of activism and resistance”.

After years running a network of family planning agencies in New York and working on a local taskforce which recognised the links between sexual assault, domestic abuse and teen pregnancies, Scott moved to Scotland in 2000 to do a PhD on Scottish domestic abuse policy.

“When I moved here we were watching the first domestic abuse debate and I had an epiphany that I had ended up in the right country at the right time. At that time Scotland was fourth in the world in its number of women representatives, and there were many MSPs who were clearly ‘femocrats’,” she says.

“It became clear to me over time that there was a political consensus in the Scottish Parliament that was not replicated elsewhere in the UK and which had extraordinary potential.”

Now, she says, Scotland has the “gold standard” legislation in the form of the Domestic Abuse Act of 2018, and boasts the “best domestic abuse policing in Europe”. That being said, she stresses that Scotland is still “far from good enough”.

Like Greenan, Scott says the key to addressing this is through prevention. “I think we’ve made great progress in Scotland to moving from a language of saying ‘inequality causes violence against women; to saying ‘what does that mean we have to do?’,” she says.

“But we are so far away from addressing issues like women in poverty, the lack of women in parliament, closing the pay gap, and the childcare discussion has been abysmal.

“We have to address this, otherwise it’s just nice words. It’s important that women have refuges and rape crisis centres but that’s not getting at the problem, it’s getting at the result of the problem.”

However, Scott emphasises that it is important to acknowledge the progress achieved so far. “If we don’t recognise the risks we have taken we won’t have the courage to do the next hard thing.”

During her early years in Scotland, Scott volunteered on the board of Engender and took part in work on feminist policy with women across Europe, which brought home to her the importance of making change on a global scale. This, she says, is a central part of 16 Days, and one which Scotland has increasingly engaged with.

“My experience in the violence against women sector for 20 years is that 16 Days was not widely known in the early years. It has grown in visibility across the world, but my observation is that at that time in Scotland we had our heads down about how to make devolution work and it wasn’t until we became confident in that that the Scottish Government started to look out beyond Scotland and think about how to work on a global scale. That was an enormous enabler for us.”

Scott suggests that being able to learn from feminist activism and policy in other countries has helped to drive change in Scotland and to encourage Scottish politicians to work to be “seen as innovators in policy on violence against women”.

“We can go to see what’s happening in Sweden and France and say that if we want to be leading on this, we need to be doing more. It’s a gift to be part of that sisterhood,” she says.

THIS sense of international solidarity through 16 Days has become a more demonstrable reality in recent years, as there are an increasing number of events in Scotland which highlight the experiences of women from other parts of the world.

One such event is the film night and discussion being held Amina Muslim Women’s Resource Centre in Dundee tomorrow, featuring experts on gender-based violence from Egypt and Pakistan.

Amina’s ending violence against women and girls development officer Sara McHaffie says she feels this is a mark of how much more “interconnected” feminists around the world have become. “I don’t think that in 1991 it would have been as easy to meet and speak with women who were involved in furthering women’s rights in Egypt or Pakistan as it is now,” she says.

“I think it’s easier to reach out and share good practice via conversations on Twitter or in real life, as people travel more and want to link their work with work that happens globally.”

The event will showcase a film, Just Cos I’m a Girl, which documents issues raised by young Muslim women and girls in Scotland. Recognising that violence against women happens in all communities and “building solidarity across difference” is integral to 16 Days and broader feminist campaigning, McHaffie says.

While there has in the past been a “reluctance to share the work of women who might be more challenging to identify with”, McHaffie says it is encouraging that “more mainstream organisations are now making the effort to link up with members of more diverse communities”.

“I think it can still be difficult for activists from different groups of women to share their stories and wisdom without others making assumptions based on their identities,” she explains.

“We’ve been part of a wonderful collaboration with Zero Tolerance and the Church of Scotland on the AnyWomanAnywhere campaign. It’s been lovely to work as part of a bigger team and I hope it’s a model for how partnerships could work in the future with other organisations.”

Zero Tolerance, which was launched in 1992 by two Edinburgh-based women with the purpose of campaigning to end violence against women, has become a leading organiser of Scotland’s 16 Days events. The organisation held its seventh Write to End Violence Against Women Awards this week, which seeks to encourage better reporting on gender-based violence and inequality.

This year, Zero Tolerance also urged people to write to MSPs and ask them to attend the annual debate on 16 Days, arguing that dwindling attendance reflected a lack of appreciation of the extent of the ongoing problem.

Co-director of Zero Tolerance Rachel Adamson, who joined the organisation in 2016, says she feels there is a sense of misplaced “complacency” on the issue. While progress has certainly taken place since Zero Tolerance’s inception almost 30 years ago, Adamson stresses that “behind every change to laws, structures, and attitudes are feminists who worked tirelessly for these victories”.

“The 16 Days are a time to celebrate these momentous achievements. But they also remind us of all the battles still to fight,” she adds. “The 16 Days is a global campaign that loudly asserts to the world that there is an epidemic – we have to successfully engage politicians and the public and build the momentum to ensure that it lasts all year.”

Based on snapshot figures from Scottish Women’s Aid, on just one day in 2019, 1235 women, children and young people were in contact with Women’s Aid services around Scotland. On that day, 23 women and eight children and young people who requested refuge accommodation could not be offered a space.

Meanwhile, Rape Crisis Scotland reports that an average of over 1000 survivors of sexual violence were on waiting lists to access support on any given day in the last year. As a result, Rape Crisis has been crowdfunding through its £16 for 16 Days campaign.

These figures, and the fact that lifeline services are required to turn to community fundraising is a reflection of both a crisis of funding and, at its root, a crisis of demand for support which prevention would render unnecessary. Unless and until that changes, Scotland’s feminists are likely to be recognising – and protesting – 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence for many years to come.