By zohra moosa | 13 November 2007, 22:14

From 25 November to 10 December I will be running a new blog on the 16 Days of Activism on Violence Against Women on openDemocracy. And you’re invited!

This year’s theme is ‘Demanding Implementation, Challenging Obstacles: End Violence Against Women’ and I’m planning to cover the following topics:

• Security, masculinities and the state: resolution 1325, human security, accountability etc
• Rape and impunity: conviction rates, criminalization, social attitudes etc
• Healthy bodies: reproductive health and control, HIV/AIDS, access to safe abortion etc
• Coercion and control: forced marriage, ‘honour’ crimes, FGM, harassment etc
• Women as trade: the sex trade, slavery, trafficking, prostitution etc

The full blog will include a combination of longer articles, shorter blog posts and podcasts from around the world. It is led by openDemocracy’s 50.50 initiative which aims to increase the number of female readers and writers in their work.

I would love to have lots of F word readers be contributors. I know you have things to say on violence against women – for 16 days there’s a new platform for you to do it.

Interested? Here’s the scoop: blog posts should be between 200-600 words and the first deadline is 21 November. You can write on any of the themes. You can even discuss a 16 day event you went to or analyse new research or activism you know of.

If you have something to say and it doesn’t quite sit within any of the themes, be in touch anyway as that’s not a problem. If you’ve never blogged before, fear not. It is all quite unscary in the end I promise.

For more information or to discuss next steps, email Jessica at oD.

See you on the 25th.

Photo by CheriGaulke, shared under a Creative Commons license