Forgotten Behind Bars: Political Repression of Women's Rights Activists.
“The seeds of success in every nation on Earth are best planted in women and children.” - Joyce Banda
time to read: 4 min
Last month, the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) held its 69th session at United Nations Headquarters in New York. The two-week event was an opportunity to reflect on the 30th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women and the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995), a pathbreaking blueprint for advancing women’s rights. This year’s CSW offered opportunities for women’s rights groups to celebrate, strategize, and exchange ideas with one another. But it was also a sobering moment as participants took stock of waning funding and policy commitments towards gender equality. With the rise of democratic backsliding and state-sponsored gender backlash, women’s rights activists are at increased risk of facing state violence and imprisonment. As this year also marks the 25th anniversary of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda, we must not only press forward with its implementation but also leverage this global framework to protect women’s rights activists against the criminalization of public dissent and the gendered violence and indignities they face when incarcerated.
While WPS debates often spotlight the importance of women’s participation in peace operations and mediation, Resolutions 1820, 1888, 2106, 2122, and 2467 all emphasize security sector reforms, which include the promotion of the rule of law, penal reform, and addressing prison conditions as crucial to implementing WPS. For women engaged in public dissent and activism, risks of imprisonment are all too real.
State-sponsored backlash against women who disrupt the status quo is a widespread and powerful tactic used for repression in authoritarian states and democracies alike. Here, in Canada, anti-racism activists Adora Nwofor and Taylor McNallie have been victims of charge stacking by the Calgary Police and Courts. “Stacking charges” is a tactic used to increase one’s potential of receiving an incredibly long sentence, backing them into a corner in which a plea deal is most desirable; this deal is conditioned on the defendant claiming themselves as “guilty,” which undermines the integrity of their activism by making their labelling as “criminals” legitimate, thus hindering their public image. The deliberate misuse of our legal system highlights how the criminal justice system can be weaponized to silence and discredit activists and reinforce the maintenance of existing power structures that marginalize racialized women.[1]
In Uganda, Stella Nyanzi, a scholar and gender rights advocate, was charged and jailed on charges of cyber harassment of the president. Like many other political prisoners before her, Nyanzi wrote No Roses from My Mouth, a poetry book about what she observed in prison. She documented, among other things, the violence of women prison officers, the lack of sanitary products for women detainees, and the plight of children accompanying their incarcerated mothers.
In Iran, many women involved in “The Girls of Revolution Street,” which began in 2017 when Vida Movahed stood on a utility box waving her white headscarf on a stick in defiance of the compulsory hijab laws implemented, face state violence. Inspired by Modaved’s act of civil disobedience, they followed in her footsteps. This included Narges Hosseini, who was imprisoned in 2018 when she mimicked Movahed’s actions. She then faced unreasonably high bail, unwarranted judicial delays, manipulative judicial tactics, and prosecution under three criminal charges for one act of protest.[2]
Additionally, in Canada, with our implementation of mandatory charging policies, survivors of intimate-partner violence are disproportionately incarcerated upon seeking police assistance, inflicting damage on these women by wrongfully confining them in prison spaces lacking adequate mental health resources and support, thereby adding layers to their pre-existing trauma.[3]
While men are more likely to be incarcerated than women, carceral institutions remain spaces where women face a great deal of inequality. For example, they lack adequate health and reproductive care or are denied sanitary menstrual products. Furthermore, women in prisons are also susceptible to overcrowding, gender-based violence, solitary confinement, and harassment, as well as a lack of childcare support, particularly in a context where young children are detained alongside their mothers. Lastly, 2SLGBTQ+ individuals, especially trans women, also face additional layers of discrimination, isolation, and oppression in prison spaces.
As we continue to seek to advance gender justice, we must reflect on how we can better amplify female voices and apply the WPS agenda to ensure the protection of female activists against state-sponsored backlash.[4] As countries like the United States and the Netherlands have recently drastically cut their funding to support gender equality initiatives, we must remember the plight of incarcerated women. While for some, prisons may symbolize accountability, they remain spaces where gendered violence and inequality are overlooked. Security sector reform under the WPS agenda should look to the inclusion of women in prison services. But it must also look to restructuring our justice institutions for more fairness. In order to comprehensively realize the objectives of the WPS agenda, it is imperative that we tackle the misuse of prison systems through calling for reforms aimed at protecting female activists, investigating cases of wrongful incarceration.
[1] A campaign to support Adora Nwofor and Taylor McNallie as they experience legal abuse by the Calgary Police Service. Stop the Stack YYC. (2024). https://www.stopthestackyyc.ca/
[2] Kaufman, J., Saranj, P., & Sotoudeh, N. (2023). Women, Life, Freedom: Our Fight for Human Rights and Equality in Iran. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/book.114071.
[3] Hoffer, E. (2024, March 27). Failure to protect: the criminalization of survivors of intimate-partner violence. Policy Options. https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/march-2024/mandatory-charging-intimate-violence/
[4] CSW69 / beijing+30 (2025). UN Women . (2025). https://www.unwomen.org/en/how-we-work/commission-on-the-status-of-women/csw69-2025