EACH year the world commemorates 16 days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence (GBV), from the 25th of November to December 10th.  Many events and campaigns take place around this time but it is not everyone who understands what the 16 Days of Activism Campaign is about. 

GBV is violence directed at a person on the basis of their gender or sex. While both men and women are subject to gender based violence, women and girls are more prone. GBV is a fundamental violation of human rights and is often fuelled by long standing social and cultural norms that reinforce its acceptability in society by both men and women.

GBV takes many forms, including domestic violence, sexual violence, physical abuse, psychological and economic abuse – even the refusal to speak to someone can be regarded as violence.

Of increasing concern lately are the links between GBV and HIV. GBV, both directly and indirectly, exposes both men and women to HIV infection.  The actual act of violence, or fear of violence, prevents people from accessing information on HIV prevention, or even from accessing treatment itself, joining support groups and seeking other care. It also prevents them from disclosing their HIV status and therefore continue to re-infect one another. For example, a woman might test HIV positive and fail to disclose her HIV status due to fear of violence and thereby continue to infect her partner.

 What is the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence Campaign?

The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence is an international campaign originating from the first Women's Global Leadership Institute, sponsored by the Center for Women's Global Leadership (CWGL), in 1991.
On December 6, 1989 an enraged gunman roamed the corridors of Montreal's École Polytechnic and killed 14 women, engineering students. Marc Lepine, 25, separated the men from the women and before opening fire on the classroom of female engineering students he screamed, "I hate feminists." Almost immediately, the Montreal Massacre became a galvanizing moment in which mourning turned into outrage about violence against women.
Most feminist and many official perspectives regard the massacre as an anti-feminist attack and as representative of wider societal violence against women, and the anniversary of the massacre has since been commemorated as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women.
There are five special days within the 16 days campaign.

• 25 November: International Day for the elimination of Violence Against Women
• 1 December: World AIDS Day
• 3 December: International Day for the Disabled
• 6 December: Anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, when a man gunned down 14 women engineering students for allegedly being feminist
• 10 December: Human Rights Day

The 16 Days Campaign has been used as an organising strategy by individuals and groups around the world to call for the elimination of all forms of violence against women by:

• Raising awareness about gender-based violence as a human rights issue at the local, national, regional and international levels

• Strengthening local work around violence against women
• Establishing a clear link between local and international work to end violence against women
• Providing a forum in which organizers can develop and share new and effective strategies
• Demonstrating the solidarity of women around the world organizing against violence against women
• Creating tools to pressure governments to implement promises made to eliminate violence against women

Over 2,000 organisations in approximately 154 countries have participated in the 16 Days Campaign since 1991.

The Annual Theme

Every year, CWGL composes a campaign theme in consultation with women's human rights advocates worldwide, which it then circulates as widely as possible. The theme for this year’s campaign is: Demanding Implementation, Challenging Obstacles: End Violence Against Women!
The theme encourages individuals and organizations to demand the implementation of all policies and practices aimed at ending gender-based violence. According to the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, the focus of this year’s campaign should be to:

• Demand and secure adequate funding for work on Violence against Women
• Call for greater accountability and political commitment from states to prevent and punish all forms of violence against women in practice, not just in words;
• Increase awareness of the impact of violence against women, including engaging in measures to end it by men and boys;
• Evaluate the impact and effectiveness of work to prevent violence against women;
• Secure the space for advocacy and protecting the defenders of women’s human rights in their work to end gender based violence.

The International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women
In December 1999, at their 54th Session, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring November 25th the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. This was in recognition of the magnitude of the problem and the urgent need for serious commitment by the world community to find solutions, a key priority.
The origins of November 25th go back to 1960, when the Mirabal sisters, activists from the Dominican Republic, were violently assassinated for their political activism. The sisters, known as the 'Unforgettable Butterflies,' became a symbol of the crisis of violence against women in Latin America. November 25th was the date chosen to commemorate their lives and promote global recognition of gender-based violence, and it has been observed in Latin America since the 1980s.
Human Rights Day
Human Rights Day is celebrated annually across the world on 10 December
The date was chosen to honour the United Nations General Assembly's adoption and proclamation, on 10 December, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - the first global enunciation of human rights The commemoration was established in 1950, when the General Assembly invited all states and interested organisations to celebrate the day as they saw fit.
World AIDS Day
December 1st is World AIDS Day. Established by the World Health Organization in 1988, World AIDS Day serves to focus global attention on the devastating impact of the HIV and AIDS epidemic. Observance of this day provides an opportunity for governments, national AIDS programmes, faith organisations, community organisations and individuals, to demonstrate the importance of the fight against HIV and AIDS.
With an estimated 38.6 million people worldwide living with HIV at the end of 2005, and more than 25 million people having died of AIDS since 1981, December 1st serves to remind everyone that action makes a difference in the fight against HIV and AIDS.
Why focus on violence against women and HIV and AIDS?

Today, half or more than half, of the 40 million people infected with HIV in the world are women. Millions of those infected with HIV are young people aged 15-24 years, who now account for half of all new infections. And perhaps most disturbing of all, in sub-Saharan Africa, young women (15-24 years), account for 75% of HIV infections and are approximately three times more likely to be infected than young men of the same age.

GBV plays a role in this disproportionate vulnerability of women and it contributes to the fact that AIDS control efforts have largely failed to stem the epidemic in women and girls.

The high rates of HIV infection in women have brought the problem of violence against women into sharp focus. There is a growing recognition that women and girls’ risk of and vulnerability to, HIV infection is shaped by deep-rooted and pervasive gender inequalities - and violence against them in particular.

Studies conducted in many countries indicate that a substantial proportion of women have experienced violence in some form or another at some point in their life. Studies from Rwanda, Tanzania, and South Africa show up to three fold increases in risk of HIV infection among women who have experienced violence, compared to those who have not. For millions of women, the experience or fear of violence is a daily reality and increasingly, so is HIV.

Violence against women is well recognised as a gross violation of human rights and a public health problem, an epidemic that often overlaps with the AIDS epidemic.

The extent of the problem: Prevalence of violence against women and girls

• Globally, between 10 and 69% of women report physical abuse by an intimate partner at least once in their lives.
• Between 6 and 47% of adult women worldwide report being sexually assaulted by intimate partners in their lifetime.
•  Between 7 and 48% of girls and young women age 10-24 years report their first sexual encounter as coerced.
• In sub-Saharan Africa, almost 61% of adults living with HIV in 2007 are women

Sources:-
http://www.iheu.org/node/1370
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Day_for_the_Elimination_of_Violence_against_Women
http://www.cwgl.rutgers.edu/16days/about.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Rights_Day
http://www.hhs.gov/aidsawarenessdays/days/world/index.html
http://archives.cbc.ca/IDD-1-70-398/disasters_tragedies/montreal_massacre/
UNAIDS and WHO – AIDS EPIDEMIC UPDATE DECEMBER 2007
WHO 2002; Garcia-Moreno and Watts 2000; Heise et al. 1999