Regions in the response to violence against women and girls: rights, governance and effective action for global transformation

Neus Pociello

ORU Fogar Gender Equality Group Director 

The International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women marks the annual launch of the global 16 Days of Activism campaign led by the United Nations. It is not a commemorative date or symbolic campaign: it is a reminder of the unresolved debt owed to half of humanity. Violence against women and girls remains one of the most widespread and systematic human rights violations worldwide. According to UN Women (2024), almost one in three women has experienced violence in her lifetime — a figure that is, as we will see, an underestimation, since official surveys do not include all women, rendering this grim reality even broader and more invisible. 

Women’s and girls’ rights organisations warn that the real magnitude of violence far exceeds official figures, and highlight how data gaps, underreporting and impunity conceal hundreds of thousands of femicides and other forms of gender-based violence every year around the world. Moreover, less than 0.2% of international assistance reaches grassroots women’s rights organisations, and many have been forced to suspend programmes due to funding cuts, undermining prevention, early detection, support and reparation. The World Health Organization recognises gender-based violence as a global public health issue, and the United Nations has identified it as a direct threat to peace, security and democracy. 

These figures are not merely statistics: they expose a power structure that sustains inequalities, discrimination and violence against women and girls across all areas of life. In addition, official surveys continue to exclude the majority: they do not reach girls, older women, racialised women, women in rural areas or women with non-normative abilities, among many others encompassed in the plural “women and girls”, a category that reflects diverse subjectivities, trajectories and lived realities. This systematic exclusion is itself part of the problem. 

Violence against women and girls is structural and interconnected. It cuts across personal, social, political, economic, digital and environmental spheres; it manifests through poverty, wage inequality, control over women’s bodies, restricted access to justice or limited representation in institutions. It is persistent and is exacerbated in situations of forced displacement due to climate-related events, restricted access to natural resources, structural poverty rooted in neocolonial dynamics or armed conflict. This reality demands addressing the structural drivers of gender-based violence and shaping responses that ensure equity in the recognition and exercise of rights, leaving no one behind — a core principle of distributive justice and the 2030 Agenda. It also requires recognising women and girls as agents of change, rights-holders with political agency and collective strategies that sustain communities and economies — including care systems —

generating social and economic development and maintaining networks of collective resilience and reparation. 

Against this backdrop, it is essential to consider the role of institutions, particularly regional governments. The sustained work of grassroots movements has transformed, across different contexts, their relationship with institutions: what for decades were fragmented, reactive and partial responses have, in some territories, given way to a cooperative paradigm. Within this framework, regional governments emerge as key actors: due to their proximity to communities, their planning capacity and their direct responsibilities in core areas such as health, education, employment, housing, social protection and territorial development. And indeed, in today’s international ecosystem, regions are recognised as actors in their own right, despite persistent challenges in influencing multilateral agendas. 

This does not mean that all regions move at the same pace — disparities between territories are significant and, in many places, policies remain absent or insufficient — but there are clear examples of the transformative potential of regions when they act consistently in line with human rights and gender equality. The Government of Catalonia (2021–2024), the Province of Córdoba (Argentina) and the Province of Pichincha (Ecuador), recipients of the ORU FOGAR Regional Best Practices Award, have shown that it is possible to implement transformative, cross-sectoral public policies with sustained participation of women’s rights organisations. Their role is not complementary or peripheral: it is indispensable. Limiting their participation constitutes, in itself, a form of institutional violence. 

Even the strongest experiences share a common element: without clear and committed political leadership, and without sufficient and predictable resources, these policies lose impact and continuity. Without sustainable financing, multilateral engagement on the human rights of women and girls often remains rhetorical; ensuring stable resources, institutional autonomy and horizontal partnerships is a foundational requirement for any public policy aimed at preventing, addressing and redressing gender-based violence. 

This aligns with another core challenge: gender inequality continues to shape subnational governance. Only one in five regional presidencies worldwide is held by a woman, and less than one-third of senior subnational leadership positions are occupied by women (UN Women / IPU 2024). This imbalance reproduces the very power dynamics that underpin violence and limits the reach of public policy. Ensuring women’s representation in institutions is therefore a prerequisite for democratic quality, transparency and institutional effectiveness. 

In this context, regional multilateralism can only be effective in addressing gender based violence if it is grounded in the recognition of the situated knowledge of women and girls, with formal, stable and decision-linked spaces for dialogue. There 

can be no real justice or equality without meaningful democratic participation, nor effective cooperation without reciprocity. Multi-stakeholder partnerships — among public institutions, human rights organisations, academia, local communities, the social and solidarity economy and, under strict regulation, the private sector — are essential to generate coordinated and transformative responses. The ECOSOC Partnership Forum 2025 underscored the need for networks linking global and local levels, enabling knowledge-sharing and amplifying the voices of historically excluded groups. When such collaboration is stable, transparent and jointly owned, transformation becomes effective public policy. 

All this is even more relevant in a context marked by the rise of movements and narratives that challenge fundamental rights, erode international consensus and seek to reverse progress made towards gender equality and the elimination of all forms of gender-based violence. This reactive backlash — combining disinformation, institutional weakening and attempts to delegitimise women’s rights organisations — directly affects public action. In this landscape, regions — as levels of government with strong territorial anchoring and proximity to communities — are indispensable in upholding and protecting commitments and obligations related to the human rights of women and girls. 

This approach is aligned with the major UN frameworks and instruments — CEDAW, the Beijing Platform for Action, the 2030 Agenda, the Pact for the Future and the New Agenda for Peace — which situate progress on gender equality and the elimination of gender-based violence as prerequisites for healthy, safe and democratic societies. The upcoming CSW70, focused on access to justice for all women and girls, will be a key test of this commitment. Justice is not only a legal construct: it is reparation, recognition and meaningful participation. Regions can help ensure that justice reaches all territories and all women and girls, with their voices present and their rights effectively upheld. 

Ultimately, violence against women and girls is neither inevitable nor an individual issue: it is an institutional and collective failure. Eradicating it is a human rights obligation, and the solutions are not to be invented anew: they already exist in interregional and global alliances, in the expertise of women’s organisations working daily at community level, and in sustained action across territories. When regions take on this leadership, work through multi-stakeholder partnerships and act hand in hand with civil society, they can become the tipping point that turns international commitments into real and enforceable guarantees of the human right of all women and girls to live a life free from violence.