The opinions expressed here represent the views of each woman. FiLiA does not necessarily endorse or support every woman's opinion, but we uphold women's rights to freedom of belief, thought and expression.
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It is remarkable that a women such as Florence Canning could disappear without a trace after devoting nearly ten years of her life campaigning for the vote.
There is no memorial to Florence in Brighton, indeed, there is nothing to remember Florence anywhere, apart from her grave in the churchyard of St Paul’s Church, Tupsley, Hereford, and even that was in need of restoration prior to a successful Crowdfunder in spring 2023.
To Saudi Arabia’s allies in London and Washington: stop treating our lives like a line item on a trade deal. From Trump’s Riyadh photo-ops to his latest pledge of ‘no more lectures on how to live,’ the message is clear: authoritarianism is culture, and repression is tradition—as long as the oil keeps flowing. And from Keir Starmer’s silence, it seems Britain agrees. The economy comes first, human rights second. We’re not asking for heroism. We’re asking you to stop hiding behind diplomacy while our rights are crushed. If you can put human rights on the table when it's Russia or Iran, you can do the same with Saudi Arabia. If you can leverage deals for weapons, oil, and football, you can do it for freedom.
We left the day in awe of Ash and her team in pushing forward with this important bill. We will continue to support it. We know that the more we move towards positive change, the louder the voices of opponents will be. We will continue to amplify the voices of survivors and encourage as many women as possible to support this bill and bring change.
Many of the women we have spoken to feel frustrated with decision makers who seem blind to the female perspective or the impact their work has on women.
Behind our laws, practice and provision, workplace policies or budget cuts, there’s often an invisible bias ‒ one that disproportionately adversely affects women.
And the impact is felt even harder by those at the intersections of race, disability, class and migration status. Too often the needs of women with disabilities, ethnic minority and migrant women, lesbians and women living in poverty are ignored, their voices sidelined, and their struggles compounded by policies that never considered them in the first place.
Then once they've grown into women, the medical model dismisses women as exaggerating pain ‒ simply walking hysterical hormone sacks fainting at the slightest breeze.
Maybe they grow up and find someone to love and support them? But abuse and exploitation of disabled women figures show they are more vulnerable and have fewer services available for them. There are less shelters; they are less able to just quickly jump on a free train and escape and risk losing the services and medication they need.
As FiLiA volunteers, our group consisted of women from different parts of the world. Some of us grew up believing that sex-based violence was mainly an African issue, shaped by the struggles in our home countries. The UK, after all, prides itself on human rights and women’s rights. But as we stood among thousands of women, each carrying their own stories of pain and survival, we realised a harsh truth: violence against women knows no borders.
One of the most terrifying experiences women face is the Home Office Reporting System. For years, I had to report in person every single week, knowing that, at any moment, I could be detained.
The impact on mental health is devastating. The days before reporting are filled with anxiety, not knowing if you will come back, not knowing if that would be your day to disappear into detention.
The fear is relentless. Reporting is framed as a welfare check, but we must call it what it truly is: state-sanctioned psychological warfare. These women already live under strict controls, in National Asylum Support Service accommodation, barely surviving on limited financial support. The Home Office knows exactly where they are. So why force them to report? To keep them in fear.
We all know how we got here. The failure of the left to address the gender identity activism gave this extraordinary open goal to the right. It was all predictable; we predicted it. Now we’re here.
This does not absolve us from thinking critically about the harmful consequences of working with Christian Right groups, including the ADF and the Heritage Foundation, which are coalition partners in Project 2025.
The English version is followed by the French version.
La version anglaise est suivie de la version française.
This article marks the ten-year anniversary of Canada’s prostitution law reform, Bill C-36, also known as the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act. This landmark legislation was a critical step in acknowledging the harms of the prostitution system, aiming to protect women and children from sexual exploitation while reducing demand and incidence. Over the past decade, feminist groups have actively evaluated and critiqued the law’s application, identifying both its successes and areas in need of improvement. This article provides a vital opportunity to understand the ongoing efforts to combat sexual exploitation, the challenges faced in implementing laws that prioritise equality, and the importance of relentless advocacy in the fight for a society free from exploitation.
In North-East Syria, also known as ‘Rojava’ (the Kurdish name for Western Kurdistan), the Syrian state largely withdrew after the people's uprising in 2012. The majority Kurdish population in the region took the initiative and began to establish self-administration on the basis of communes and councils and empowerment of women. From the beginning of the revolution, women organised themselves independently, set up their own communes and councils, participated in all political decisions, and implemented a co-chair-system and gender quotas in all institutions as well as women's and family laws. A women's revolution began in Rojava.
Women have been key to the success of the trade union, and they have reaped huge benefits from the collective successes of the wider labour movement. However, too often, the movement has let women down.
We want to change that.
Join the FiLiA Trade Union Women's Network and help us make unions work for women.
This is not all of us ‒ the killed ones are missing.
This was the chanting of thousands of mostly Women that marched along the Gran Via in Madrid yesterday, accompanied by the drumming of a group of Women dressed in black that seemed to replicate the heartbeat of those of us there and echo the ones of those who are no longer with us.
Here at FiLiA in the Women First team, we firmly challenge the notion of prostitution as being in any way empowering. We consider it another form of male violence. As part of the Women First project, we have interviewed sex trade survivors who collectively have over 100 years’ experience of being in the sex trade. This has included street, escort, sugar daddy and brothel work. Their experiences were all different but many of the themes were similar, namely that trauma and abuse served as a gateway into the sex trade and that it takes time and specialist support to exit and recover from the sex trade.
Kiri Tunks is a veteran trade union and women's rights activist @kiritunks
This blog is based on a speech made by Kiri Tunks on behalf of the FiLiA Trade Union Project at a Labour Women’s Declaration fringe at the 2024 Labour Party Conference in Liverpool. In it, Kiri argues that women need to be at the head and the heart of the labour and trade union movement.
One wonders how the world’s largest human rights organisation, whose main claim is to ‘work to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied’ has found itself in opposition to women - some of whom have been victim to the most egregious suppression of their rights and dignity - discussing what has happened to them and why.
Porn and Porn-influenced culture is shaping the way children construct sexual behaviour and relationships. In this blog I outline a number of the harms of pornography and how teachers - as well as parents/carers and other professionals who work with children - can have clear and factual conversations with children about the harms of porn-influenced sexual abuse.
This piece combines the reflections of FiLiA’s Anti-Prostitution Lead Luba Fein and FiLiA’s Spokeswoman Raquel Rosario Sánchez after participating in the 4 th World Congress to Abolish Prostitution. The Congress was organised by CAP International, Canadian-based organisation La Cles, Breaking Free, the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter and the EVA Centre. At the end of the Congress, the organisations launched the Montreal’s Call for the Abolition of Prostitution, which is signed by more than 60 organisations.
Mexican women and men went to their polling stations, the overwhelming majority to vote for a woman to be the next President of Mexico. A woman in charge of a State, which has miserably failed, so far, to guarantee a dignified life for women. Despite national laws, and international treaties, in Mexico women are not free from violence. Every day, the lives of over 64.5 million women in this country are plagued by femicide, and all kinds of violence: sexual, political, economic, reproductive, institutional, symbolic and structural.
Women and nature are both exploited under capitalist patriarchy - both legally and illegally. In addition, the climate crisis already disproportionately impacts women, who comprise 70% of the world's poor and face barriers to migration. Ecofeminism looks to women and nature for solutions to a man-made problem.
Gemma Aitchison is founder of YES Matters UK that supports children and young people who have suffered sexual abuse and exploitation. She also campaigns and works to prevent VAWG and improve victim rehabilitation including the compulsory PSHE curriculum and CSE Prevention Policy. She says ‘My mother died on Wednesday. As a survivor of CSEA and given that over 80% of perpetrators of CSEA are family members and family friends I figured my complex struggles around this are not unique. One that women who are survivors will relate to. It's a poem about that.’
Yasmin Morais is the founder of Vulva Negra, the first materialist feminist project ‘born from the desire to unite the materialist perspective of radical feminism with the narratives of black theorists and the lived experience of black Brazilian and Afro-Latin women.’ Yasmin travels around Brazil and the world with her itinerant lectures at the ‘Encontro Feminista Vulva Negra’ (Vulva Negra Feminist Meeting).
In this interview, Andreia Nobre talks to Yasmin Morais about the many pressing issues currently affecting Brazilian women, including femicide, domestic violence and the plight of black and brown women in a Latin American country, despite the country having been under a leftist government since Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected for office in 2022 for the third time.
Lisa-Marie (FiLiA CEO) was introduced to the issue of the Kurdish struggle by Rahila Gupta. FiLiA recognised the potential of the Kurdish women's struggle to inform our understanding of the potential for liberation and has platformed Kurdish women's voices at conference, and in our blogs and podcasts, as well as attending in-person solidarity meetings. For this contribution, Rahila Gupta, author and activist, was invited to shape an interview with Kongra Star, the women's umbrella group leading the women's revolution in Rojava, North and East Syria. Kongra Star did what they do so well ‒ they used a collaborative approach and invited contributions from many women's groups in the region. The result is an extraordinary piece and one that we are very pleased to share with you on International Women's Day.
On UN International Day of Education, Rose Rickford shares what she has learnt from researching women's skills sharing projects of 1970s-90s Britain. Across the world, women are still systematically excluded from learning and using a whole range of manual skills. Even in countries with relatively high levels of educational equity, vocational training is still almost entirely sex-segregated. While young women learn care and beauty skills, young men learn construction and manufacturing skills. When it comes to getting work, jobs in skills that men learn are much better paid, so this is an important issue for women's equality. Part of the solution is of course to pay higher wages for the skills that women train in. But another part is to increase women’s participation in skills they are currently excluded from. In the 1970s-90s, women set up their own courses and projects to teach one another these skills. For those who took part, it was a doorway to a world they were previously locked out from.
