The first global dialogue explored emerging issues and challenges in the global efforts to end violence against women.

CREA convened activists and grant makers who based their work on the understanding that women’s roles can be multiple and intersecting – as victims, survivors and perpetrators – and have used innovative strategies to deal with prevention and service issues. Participants articulated a complex understanding of the forms, causes, discourse and strategies to address violence against women.

The Inter South Dialogue was an effort to link the discourses on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) between organisations working in the global South, whose views were not included in SRHR discourse.

CREA partnered with INFORM, MASUM, North East Network, SAMA, and TARSHI to hold a strategic dialogue on sexual and reproductive rights among activists working in Latin America and South Asia.

The dialogue focused on the meanings of SRHR across contexts, the role of sexuality in these discussions, and how these terms are being integrated into health service delivery systems.

The Women’s Health and Human Rights Initiative of Columbia University collaborated with CREA, Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML), AWID, and INFORM. The global dialogue highlighted that even during times of utter despair, ordinary people organize to claim justice. These efforts—from families who lost relatives to 9/11, survivors of conflict in Sri Lanka and Rwanda, and Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina—emerge from those who are often not part of organized movements, and deserve greater visibility as strategic models of resistance.

Co-hosted by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), this global dialogue explored how diverse social movements—including labor, development, dalit, public health, sexuality, human rights, and indigenous people—understand and address women’s human rights, and how women’s rights activists have built alliances with other social movements.

In partnership with the Center for Women’s Global Leadership and the Youth Coalition, this global dialogue brought together feminist activists from different generations to discuss and share experiences about intergenerational challenges and barriers affecting feminist movements and organizations, alliance building, and future strategies.

In partnership with the Global Network of Sex Work Projects and the Open Society Foundations’ Sexual Health and Rights Program, CREA hosted this global dialogue to examine the consequences of language, policies, and programs that conflate the concepts of sex work, migration and trafficking.

Recommendations focused on how to leverage existing rights-based models that stop trafficking into the sex sector, and support anti-trafficking efforts that affirm the rights of sex workers and others affected by anti-trafficking legislation.

CREA, in partnership with SANGRAM’s Centre for Advocacy on Stigma and Marginalization (CASAM), brought together activists from the women’s movement and the sex workers’ movement to discuss the violence faced by sex workers, why it is ignored by the women’s movement, and how it can be addressed by anti-violence against women campaigns. This was the first time that many people from the violence against women and sex workers rights’ movements were able to gather at a global level to discuss sex work without a heated debate or strong oppositional stances on the issue of sex work as work.

CREA, along with Amnesty International, the Human Rights Programme at Harvard Law School, and the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale Law School organized a global dialogue on “Decriminalisation, Choice and Consent.” The main focus of the dialogue was to interrogate the conceptual underpinnings of consent, and how consent is articulated and (de) criminalized within diverse contexts, including sexual agency, orientation, marriage, identity and sexual and reproductive health and rights.

To address key tensions and fractures that divide the women’s rights, LGBTQI, sexual and reproductive rights, and disability rights/justice movements. Two priority themes included movement critiques of medicalization and the divide around access to legal abortion on grounds of fetal impairment. The goal was to identify strategies for movements to foreground an intersectional and inclusive approach to disability and sexuality.

CREA identified the need for a convening that critiques the meanings and implications of anti-gender and anti-rights politics from a feminist perspective. Globally, the trend across national and cultural contexts has been to endow the fetus with rights and social meanings separate from – and often more valued – than those of women.

The global dialogue used the construct of “fetal rights” or “fetal personhood” as a lens through which to examine how anti-gender politics works in practice to deny women’s rights. Specifically the assertion of fetal rights in opposition to, and more deserving than, the rights of women was critically examined through the way language is constructed, cultural representations, and law and policy.

CREA, in partnership with the Global Health Justice Partnership of the Yale Law School and the School of Public Health, hosted a dialogue to expand understandings of gender and its relationship to identities, expressions and rights.

The project addressed the urgent need for coherent, rights-promoting work regarding gender to proceed across human rights norms and principles in order to minimize protection gaps and to reflect the rich understandings of gender that social movements and scholars have articulated.

CREA hosted a global dialogue aimed at bridging the long-standing divisions between disability rights activists and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) activists that have historically prevented these movements from working in solidarity.

This cross-movement conversation allowed both movements to come to terms with historical exclusions, build trust, and arrive at some degree of consensus to develop a political agenda that advances the SRHR of women and girls with disabilities. The dialogue led to the creation of the Nairobi Principles on Abortion, Prenatal testing and Disability.