Advocacy & Lobbying

Ziyu, born in 2002, still remembers the first time her mother asked whether she wanted a younger sibling.

It was sometime in middle school, shortly after China loosened its birth restrictions. “I was already buried under academic pressure, emotionally dependent on my mother in the way many anxious only children are. My mother brought it up casually, half-joking: “What if we had another baby?”

She answered with shocking seriousness. “You can only choose one,” she told her. “Either them or me.”

Ziyu does not think she literally meant that she would rather die than accept a sibling. What stayed with her was the fear behind it. At that age, her mother’s attention felt inseparable from survival. The idea of sharing it felt catastrophic.

When China ended the One-Child Policy in 2015, the shift was often described in demographic terms: declining birth rates, an aging population, and a policy adjustment to encourage more births. For women born under the policy, its impact was far more intimate. It shaped how families distributed love and resources, and how young women came to understand their place within the family.

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There are phrases born from the deepest pain that end up changing history. In 1995, Mexican poet Susana Chávez Castillo wrote “Not One Woman Less, Not One More Death” as she walked the streets of Ciudad Juárez denouncing the systematic murder of women, which the state preferred to call “unfortunate incidents.” In 2011, she herself was murdered — raped and mutilated like so many of the women she had defended.

Chávez Castillo did not live to see how her words would have a lasting impact on the world. Four years after her femicide, her slogan crossed the continent.

On May 10, 2015, in Santa Fe, Argentina, Chiara Páez — 14 years old and two months pregnant — was beaten to death by her boyfriend and buried in the backyard of his family home. The entire town had been searching for her. Her father said something that no public policy should ever forget: “Chiara was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The violence did not begin that day. It has been going on for many years.”

A month after the crime, 300,000 people filled the Plaza of the Two Congresses in Buenos Aires and gathered in 80 other Argentine cities for a massive demonstration against gender-based violence, under a single slogan. Within weeks, Ni Una Menos (Not One Woman Less) was being heard in Mexico, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Bolivia, Colombia, and Paraguay.

Latin America recognized in that slogan something it already knew but which no one had named so clearly: that women are killed for being women, and that it has a name — femicide.

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The webinar was organized by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) under the Women and Youth Democratic Engagement (WYDE) Women’s Leadership Initiative, funded by the European Union and implemented in partnership with UN Women, the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), and United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), with overall coordination led by UN Women.

Held on 22 April 2026, the webinar brought together stakeholders and practitioners to review and validate a series of thematic fact sheets developed through the WYDE Women’s Leadership Initiative.

Opening remarks were delivered by Rumbidzai Kandawasvika-Nhundu, Theme Lead for Gender Equality, Empowerment and Inclusion at International IDEA, who emphasized the collaborative nature of the initiative and encouraged participants to share feedback and regional perspectives during the validation process.

PRESENTERS/SPEAKERS

• Salman Asif is a specialist in gender equality, political participation, and prevention of gender-based violence, with more than 15 years of international experience. He presented the fact sheet on male engagement in advancing women’s political participation and representation.

• Mariatu Elba is a human rights, gender equality, and governance expert with over 15 years of experience, particularly in Southern Africa. She presented the fact sheet on violence against women in politics.

• Caroline Hubbard is a gender equality and inclusive governance specialist with more than 20 years of experience. She presented the fact sheet on the global context and status of young women’s political participation and representation.

Introduction
Targeted online violence against women in public life is increasingly technologically sophisticated and damaging, triggering alarming rates of mental health diagnosis, heightened self-censorship, and more frequent escalation to law enforcement. For women human rights defenders and activists, journalists and media workers, and writers and other public communicators, online violence is often deliberate and coordinated, aiming to silence them while undermining their professional credibility and personal reputations. It also serves to fuel the reversal of hard-won rights in a climate of rising authoritarianism, democratic backsliding and networked misogyny. Gender rights rollback is both enabled and exacerbated by technologies which — by design — amplify misogynistic hate speech for profit. 

Generative AI apps are the latest manifestation of this form of subjugation. They do not just ‘nudify’ women and girls instantaneously without their consent, they simulate them being sexually assaulted. AI-assisted ‘virtual rape’ is now at the fingertips of perpetrators. This phenomenon deepens and accelerates the harm inflicted on women in public life who are increasingly targeted in online violence campaigns with an escalation in associated offline attacks, abuse and harassment, as our previous research has shown. In this publication — the second installment in the Tipping Point series that examines how online violence is constraining women’s participation in public life in the AI Age — we focus primarily on manifestations of image-based abuse and what happens after exposure to such online violence. How are survivors affected personally and professionally? What coping mechanisms do they deploy? And how do they seek legal redress? Our data is derived from a UN-Women commissioned global survey which was distributed in late 2025 in five languages, in partnership with UNESCO and the International Center for Journalists.

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Thirty (30) prospective female candidates are set to benefit from targeted training and mentorship under a new initiative aimed at increasing women’s participation and representation in Ghana’s local governance system ahead of the 2027 District Level Elections.

The project, titled “Strengthening Women’s Capacities for Effective Participation and Representation in Ghana’s Local Governance System,” was launched by ABANTU for Development in partnership with Plan International Ghana and with support from the Government of Canada.

Speaking at the launch, the Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, Dr. Agnes Naa Momo Lartey, described the initiative as a timely investment in women’s leadership and political participation.

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In the rapidly evolving digital ecosystem, a disturbing form of synthetic media has emerged as one of the most potent tools of intimidation and character assassination: sexual deepfakes. These are hyper-realistic, AI-generated images or videos that falsely depict individuals often women in explicit sexual scenarios they never participated in. While deepfake technology has legitimate uses in entertainment and education, its weaponization against women in politics and media is raising urgent ethical, legal, and democratic concerns.

Manipulating images is not new. From early political propaganda posters to digitally altered photographs in tabloids, media distortion has long been used to shape public perception. However, the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning has fundamentally changed the scale and realism of deception.

Deepfake technology, which became widely recognized around 2017, uses generative adversarial networks (GANs) to create highly convincing fake videos. What once required expert editing can now be done with accessible apps and minimal technical skill. This democratization of manipulation has shifted deepfakes from niche experimentation to mass misuse.

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