The 25th of November is International Day Against Violence Against Women and, until International Human Rights Day on 10th December, people around the world will be campaigning to emphasise that violence against women is a violation of human rights.

This Thursday, 26th November, is the main activism day for Thursdays in Black, a UK group which aims to get as many people in the UK as possible to wear black on Thursdays to highlight the cause. I was reading through the comments on their Facebook page and came across a couple which really fired something inside me, and I felt I needed to respond.

This one blames women for men getting violent:

“Now I believe in gender equality but what about the gray number. Men beaten and downtrodden. There is more and more of it. And it's seen as acceptable. It's not. Men are being emasculated all the time and we don't like it. And you wonder why we get violent...”

A comment like ‘And you wonder why we get violent’ is completely unnecessary and indefensible. Violence is never acceptable, regardless of the apparent reason.

This guy doesn’t like the fact that women are “taking men’s jobs” and that things are balanced in favour of women:

“And why do you women get all the sympathy, you're the ones mentally torturing us blokes because you want life both ways. As blokes it is a terrible stress to be mocked in such a way to lose our jobs to you and to be blamed because we don't treat you women as equals. Every part of life is stacked in your favour, but it still isn't enough is it.”

It saddens me that this is how people feel about women fighting for equality. Women aren’t looking for “sympathy”, they’re asking to be treated equally. To suggest that "Every part of life is stacked in favour of women" shows a deep lack of understanding about how women live around the world. In many countries, every part is stacked against women.

The reason for needing a cause like this is that in many cultures and societies, women are seen as inferior to men. This means violence against them is seen as acceptable and even supported in some situations.

When I was in Kenya a few weeks ago, we heard from a women’s rights organisation which told us that a women is raped in Kenya every 30 minutes. In South Africa, a woman is more likely to be raped than learn to read (More here). These stats are not meant to shock for the sake of shocking, they are to show the extent to which women are seen and treated as second class citizens, often there as objects to be used and abused by men.

Female genital mutilation is also still a massive issue in developing countries where girls are expected to have the operation and it’s both dangerous to women's health and extremely painful.

This is only a very small part of the issue, but it should already show why campaigning is so important. We need to raise awareness of the issues women are facing and keep working to achieve equality for everyone.

I hope the men that left the comments read the responses, and I really hope it helps them see things differently, because in cases of women being abused across the world, there is no grey area – for them the facts and stats about the violent situations many women find themselves in is very black and white.

Wear black on Thursdays and show solidarity with women fighting for equality across the world.

Top image: from here.