Wear orange to raise awareness
The UNiTE campaign has declared every 25th of the month to be Orange Day.
The idea is to raise awareness about the issue of violence against women and girls, not only once a year on 25 November – the International Day to End Violence against Women – but every month.
What you can do: wear orange on every 25th of the month; invite others to share posts and tweet about the Day; visit and like the Orange Day event page on Facebook; use and share the photo of the UNiTE Ribbon — the new symbol for ending violence against women and girls
Launched in 2008, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s ‘UNiTE to End Violence against Women’ campaign is a multi-year effort aimed at preventing and eliminating violence against women and girls in all parts of the world.
UNiTE calls on governments, civil society, women’s organizations, young people, the private sector, the media and the entire UN system to join forces in addressing the global pandemic of violence against women and girls.
By 2015, UNiTE aims for every country to have adopted and enforced national laws to address and punish all forms of violence against women and girls; adopted and implemented multi-sectoral national action plans; strengthened data collection on the prevalence of violence against women and girls; increased public awareness and social mobilisation and addressed sexual violence in conflict.
Five goals.
UNiTE brings together a host of UN agencies and offices to galvanise action throughout the UN system to prevent violence against women.
The campaign is also joining forces with individuals, civil society and governments and attempt to influence laws and polices.
As part of this, UN Women has developed a handbook for legislation on violence against women.
The handbook aims to provide detailed guidance in support of the adoption and effective implementation of legislation that prevents violence against women, punishes perpetrators and ensures the rights of survivors everywhere.
And a Global Virtual Knowledge Centre to End Violence against Women and Girls has been developed in a partnership including UN Women which provides over 700 practical tools in over 50 languages to assist programmers, policy-makers and advocates working to end violence against women and girls worldwide, including step-by-step guidance for developing legislation.
Other UN efforts towards putting an end to violence against women in all its forms are highlighted here.
You can’t say no one is trying.
Help raise awareness about the issue of violence against women and girls. And wear orange on the 25th of the month.
The un can say what it likes, but until it requires governments to deal with promoting sexist violence through men’s media such as porn and lads mags it is really not doing anything worthwhile apart from self serving. As it noted yesterday, more women die through sexist violence by men than do from war, cancer and malaria combined … This is truly a pandemic and yet govnments choose to leave source of infection untouched … Govnments cannot uphold freedom of speech if that speech is lies and hatred to oppress another group of people. Likewise, why no public health ads about avoiding partners that are carrying sexism as health message? So much more could b done to combat sexist violence than handwringing.