Current reflections on International Women's Day- Rights. Justice. Action.

This year’s UN mission statement made me go down a rabbit hole: Rights. Justice. Action. for all women and girls. It was upsetting to read that women hold only 64% of the rights men do. But this is not even the part that sent chills down my spine. I wanted to find out what’s changing. Surely, these numbers are heading upwards and we’re seeing progress towards full legal equality, right? However, that’s not completely true.

I remember reading ‘ A Thousand Splendid Suns’ as a child with tears welling up in my eyes as I finished every chapter. My mum would console me saying that this is just fiction. Oh, how I wish her words were true. The Taliban passed a new regulation a few weeks earlier which makes an already repressive legal system even more draconian. It’s in direct breach of International Human Rights Law and essentially legalises slavery and violence against women. Taliban’s ban on women’s education is no longer the biggest attack on Afghan women’s rights. They have now legalised punishment by husbands or a ‘master’. It further treats women as property with no legal agency of their own. Women’s lives are legally valued less than animals under the new regulation. Today, in 2026, women in Afghanistan do not have the right to even speak in public.

The reader may now take a guess of how many countries out of 195 sovereign states have achieved full legal equality for women. I’m going to hold your hand when I say this, the answer’s zero.

Coming to what is considered one of the most developed countries in the world, the United States of America moved to weaken UN support for gender equality at the latest session by The United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) on the 9th of March. The US wants references to a gender-responsive justice sector removed, and does not support the proposed reparations fund for survivors of violence, for example.

The US stance is similar to last year, when it refused to endorse the CSW’s final declaration last year, rejecting references to the UN’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and dismissing gender quotas. 42 states in the US do not have protected abortion rights. The Trump Administration headed by an alleged predator with multiple counts of sexual allegations against him, is seeking a systematic rollback of women's rights and protections and actively abandoning civil rights enforcement for women.

Women and girls, face greater barriers to justice than men in nearly 70 per cent of the countries surveyed by the UN. 54 per cent of countries lack consent based legal definitions of rape. In 2024, 676 million women and girls lived within 50km of a deadly conflict (the highest since the 1990s). As a result, there has been a reported 87 per cent increase in conflict related sexual violence violations. A 2023 report showed that deepfake pornography made up 98 percent of all deepfake videos online, and 99 per cent depicted women. With a rapid increase in the use of Gen AI, one can only guess what this means for women’s rights in 2026. The global justice system is structurally unable to keep up with the pace of technology, while the harms that it fails to address are overwhelmingly experienced by women and girls.

98% of rapists will never spend a day in prison. The "justice gap" shows that for every 100 forcible rapes, 99 perpetrators walk free. And 12 million girls are married before the age of 18 each year. The global number of child brides is now estimated at 650 million, including girls under age 18 who have already married, and adult women who married in childhood. Nearly, 3 in 4 countries still permit child marriage. As of 2020, sexual exploitation was the most detected form of trafficking, of which 92% were women and girls. While 51 of 92 countries had passed laws prohibiting female genital mutilation by 2024, enforcement is constrained, particularly where such practices retain social support.

These are just a few numbers of the crimes committed against women. This is not some propaganda or debate on whether men are superior or women, it’s about basic human rights. We are not talking about this enough, we are not angry enough. It’s incredible how desensitised we become and accept that news like these are pretty normal but there is an urgent need for structural change, starting from the root, the legislation, designed to support women’s rights, implementation of these laws, strict action against those who threaten it, support women to speak up and justice for those who do. None of us are free, until all of us are. I wish that one day, I’ll be able to wish all women everywhere, truly a happy women’s day.

---

The views expressed in WiE opinion pieces are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the organisation, its partners, other members, or any other affiliated people and organisations. As ever-learning, critical-thinking people, these opinions are subject to revision and adjustment at any time. WiE welcome constructive feedback in the comments section below and reserve the right to delete any comment deemed inappropriate, rude, irrelevant, or abusive. All posts are for informative purposes only and, while they are accurate and authentic to the best of our knowledge, WiE accepts no liability for any errors or missing information.