Funding Women Leaders and Movements at the Frontlines, part 4

Women’s funds are philanthropic vehicles to help sustain movements for transformative change. They are critical in rapidly identifying the nature of attacks against national feminist infrastructure and activists and helping to convene the emergency response required.

Challenging patriarchal forces effectively, as women’s movements do, can be extremely dangerous. It takes very little for patriarchal operatives to resort to violence. Indeed, it appears to be the preferred tactic. Research indicates that violence against women in politics is soaring.

“Women in politics” refers to women directly or indirectly engaging in political processes: women candidates for office, politicians, political party supporters, voters, government officials, and activists/human rights defenders/social leaders.

Worldwide, women are facing unprecedented levels of targeted political violence, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED)—in partnership with the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. The Project began compiling data on political violence targeting women in 2018 and detected an immediate spike in political violence targeting women across the world.

According to a 2019 article by Rebecca Ratcliffe in The Guardian entitled “Political violence against women tracked for the first time as attacks soar,” analysis suggests “a recent spike in violence, with twice as many cases reported during the first quarter of 2019 (261 events) as during the first quarter of 2018 (125 events)” based on reports collected across Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

The data traces the spike in violence against women in politics directly to women’s level of political involvement. The ACLED researchers report:

“Unprecedented numbers of women have engaged in elections in recent years, both by seeking office and by voting, setting new records in countries around the world. With these accomplishments, however, they have faced heightened risks of violence.”

The analysis finds that political violence targeting women has increased dramatically in nearly all regions, including Africa, Central Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Since 2020, some of the most violent countries for women in politics include Mexico, Colombia, China, India, Brazil, Burundi, Myanmar, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Cuba.63 Women-led protests—such as demonstrations by mothers of prisoners or women campaigning for reproductive rights—were more likely to be peaceful than other demonstrations. However, the researchers found such events were disproportionately met with violent crackdowns involving weapons, arrests, and teargas, usually by state forces.

Women, of course, are not backing down.

They are, instead, uniting into the most powerful political forces ever known, in the greatest numbers ever seen, and using that collective power to forge paths to democracy, to women’s rights, to climate repair, to gender equity, to non-violence, to racial justice, to Indigenous people’s rights, to economic justice, to public health and more education and enduring peace.

Aspiring autocrats and patriarchal authoritarians have good reason to fear women’s political participation: when women participate in mass movements, those movements are both more likely to succeed and lead to a more egalitarian democracy. In other words, fully free, politically active women threaten authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning leaders, so those leaders have a strategic reason to be sexist.

Understanding the relationship between sexism and democratic back-siding is vital for those who wish to fight against both. Established autocrats and right-wing nationalist leaders in contested democracies are united in using hierarchical gender relations to shore up nationalist, top-down, male-dominated rule.

That is why countries that pretend to embrace increased female representation in their parliaments employ multiple tactics to prevent elected women from passing transformative policies in favor of women and girls. Having long fought against social hierarchies that consolidate power in the hands of the few, feminist movements are a powerful weapon against authoritarianism. Those who wish to reverse the global democratic decline cannot afford to ignore them.

Tomorrow we learn about: Gender Justice Is Crucial for Climate Justice