This is not a celebration. Every year, November 25th marks the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, and it opens the door to the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, running until December 10, Human Rights Day.
The campaign has a rhythm: it starts with what women live through (25 November), and ends with what everyone is entitled to (10 December). The bridge between the two is the reminder that women’s safety is not a “women’s issue”. It is a human rights issue.
Sixteen days also feels like a symbolic span, but also a practical one: long enough to build momentum, short enough to feel urgent. The point is simple and uncomfortable: violence is not an exception in women’s lives, it permeates our everyday, our every choice, it’s structural, daily, and it’s fucking global. There doesn’t feel like there is a single place in this shit where women can truly feel safe. And awareness days matter only if we make them matter.
This year’s UNiTE theme is “UNiTE to End Digital Violence against All Women and Girls,” which is why I feel particularly engaged, being very close to my profession and life.
Digital violence is often treated as less real, less harmful, less urgent because the bruises aren’t visible and if it alters the way you feel confident in your everyday life, chances are you’ll be the one considered weak, overreacting. Yet online abuse, harassment, stalking, deepfake porn, doxxing, hate campaigns, and coercive control are now among the fastest-growing ways violence is exercised and normalised. And “online” never stays only online.
The 16 Days are, then, a call to do two things at once:
- name violence for what it is, in all its forms, from intimate partner violence to institutional neglect, from street harassment to digital terror;
- refuse the silence that protects it, whether in homes, workplaces, schools, courts, hospitals, or comment sections.
Coming back to an older thread: my #November25 reading list
A few years ago, here on the blog, I tried a small experiment: to stay with November 25 every day until December 10 by publishing a daily reading list of comics and graphic novels on gender violence, equality, diversity, and survival. I did it as a way to hold the line between awareness and action.
In that series I wrote — not very gently — that there are awareness days everywhere, but they are useful only if we give them weight. I also tied the work to concrete support: donating proceeds from my writing to a women-led anti-violence organisation. That reading list still lives on the blog under the November25 tag, and I’m bring it back on the new template through a dedicated section on the home page. Because the books don’t age out of this conversation. If anything, they keep proving how long we have been saying the same things, and how slow the world has been to listen.
Re-reading those entries now, in 2025, I notice two new layers that were already there, waiting:
- the continuity of violence across spaces: the hair salon, the classroom, the workplace, the street, the family home, the digital feed… different rooms, same logic of power;
- the continuity of resistance: not always loud, often messy, tired, darkly funny but stubborn. Surviving is never passive: it’s a craft every woman has to learn, and it’s treated as a normal skill to acquire, something it’s our responsibility to be savvy in.
So this year, instead of offering a brand-new list, I want to do something simpler: invite you to walk back through that older one as part of the 16 Days, one title at a time, and ask what it teaches us now, especially about the kinds of violence we’ve learned to overlook.
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