Women rights advocates gathered at UN Headquarters for the world's biggest meeting on gender equality have been sharing their concerns about the growing backlash against feminism, and how major funding cuts from donor countries could threaten programmes aimed at improving the lives of women and girls.
They have come from all over the world for the Commission on the Status of Women, two weeks of discussions, talks and networking. At the opening session on Monday, Sima Bahous, the head of UN Women (the United Nations agency for gender equality), told them that " misogyny is on the rise " and, at a townhall convened by António Guterres on Tuesday, the UN Secretary-General said that a "furious backlash" threatens to "push progress into reverse.
UN News met some of the delegates to gauge the mood and find out how they are they are feeling about the backlash against feminism flagged by UN Women, and what the threat of massive funding cuts from some major donor countries could mean for their organisations, and the people they support.
'We're going to move backwards before we move go forward'
Grace Forrest is the founding director of Walk Free, Walk Free, an international human rights group focused on the eradication of modern slavery, which produces the Global Slavery Index, considered to be the world's leading data set on measuring and understanding modern slavery.
We're here because women and girls are disproportionately impacted by nearly every form of modern slavery, from forced marriage to forced labour, debt bondage and human trafficking.
Their vulnerability to modern slavery is rising and their rights risk being rolled back throughout the world, so we wanted to come to here to put modern slavery on the agenda, in the context of an authoritarian government in the United States which is trying to ban words such as race, gender and feminism. We won't be silenced or erased.
Today, we're seeing misogyny on full display, through social media and through world leaders not mincing their words and people electing leaders who disregard safety and the value of women in the public forum.
We're extremely concerned by funding cuts from major donors. We're hearing about frontline organisations, run by people who have survived debt bondage and forced labour, having to take loans to try and keep their organisations afloat. Some of the most effective frontline organisations are being hit hardest and fastest.
Advancing the rights of women and girls is actually quite a tall order right now and it's a scary fact to face, that we're actually just going to be hoping to not move backwards. And I think we are going to go backwards before we go forward.
This is a time for systems to step up and directly call out the need for funding on issues like modern slavery.
