Ahead of the 63rd session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW 63) on social protection, feminist activists have a chance to leverage our collective power to counter the backlash on our rights and our lives by fascist, fundamentalist, authoritarian and corporate actors.

AWID and FEMNET express deep concerns about the ongoing privatization and corporate capture of social protection that is undermining human rights at an unprecedented scale.

The Young Feminist Wire interviewed Renee Bracey Sherman, a reproductive justice activist and author of Saying Abortion Aloud: Research and Recommendations for Public Abortion Storytellers and Organizations. Bracey Sherman talks about online harassment and how she dealt with it when she started writing and talking about her abortion publicly.

We are feminists because we have consciousness, because we collaborate to raise other women’s consciousness, and above all because we know that the feminist movement, with all of its ups and downs, has since long ago been fundamentally about solidarity.

Generosity is precisely the word that comes to mind as I think of the Feminist Forum against the G20 which took place late November in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Generosity of knowledge and experience, of feminist transformative energy, of solidarity. Let me show you.

Earlier this year I attended a Digital Security workshop organized by Association for Progressive Communication and Point of View in Mumbai, India. This was my first workshop on digital security and, like most others in the group, I was clueless about my expectations. I was generally aware of the larger issues of surveillance, politics of big data and other issues of concerns in the digital world. However in my mind, these were hardly issues that would ever affect me. For a very long time, I thought that digital security does not concern me because there was hardly anything of relevance from my digital existence that was of any potential significance.  

With the expansion of Internet access and the increasingly widespread use of social networks, the occurrence of crimes of violence against women on the Internet has been grown exponentially. Online activity aimed at attacking women — by publishing offensive comments and name-calling, by the unauthorized sharing of personal photos and by threatening virtual assaults — is an increasingly common practice. According to an UN report, about 73% of Internet users have been exposed to some kind of cyber-violence.

#Lifeinleggings is a story about untold stories. Barbadian feminist, blogger and creator of the hashtag Ronelle King took to social media with the support of her best friend Allyson Benn to share their stories.

Young women today are feeling the effects of fundamentalist movements differently than their mothers did--and they are uniquely positioned to challenge fundamentalisms' impact.

Now more than ever, feminist organizations need to deepen the search for autonomous resourcing models that work for our movements, on our own terms.

In spite of significant challenges, it is important to celebrate the people and movements that are creating feminist models, movements, and realities around the world.