Building Power in Feminist and Women’s Movements to End Violence against Women and Girls: Learning from Civil Society Organizations funded by the UN Trust Fund

Since 2021, the UN Trust Fund has been working with its grantee partners - all women’s rights and civil society organizations - to gather lessons on strengthening feminist and women’s movements to end violence against women and girls. In 2022, the UN Trust Fund published a literature review on key frameworks regarding movement-building to prevent and end violence against women and girls. 

The present paper follows from the literature review and is the second in a series of papers on building movements, produced in collaboration with UN Trust Fund grantees who received funding through the EU/UN Spotlight Initiative. This qualitative study closely examines the roles and work of grantee organizations in feminist/women’s movements to end violence against women and girls, and presents a practice-based conceptual framework of the key types of work they are doing to build these movements and foster progress towards their goals.

Conclusions

The work and perspectives of the Spotlight Initiative grantee organizations indicate that feminist/women’s movement building to end violence against women and girls is a strategic, iterative and long-term process in which formal and informal groups of women, girls, survivors and their allies work together to a) increase their collective power; b) amplify their voices and visibility; c) heal; and d) transform patriarchal and other intersecting oppressive ideologies, attitudes, behaviours, practices, norms and structures/systems that are the root causes of violence against women and girls and other harms.

This paper finds that seven mutually reinforcing forms of movement power – people power, leadership power, inner power, network power, narrative power, knowledge power and organizational power – are central to feminist/women’s movements to end violence against women and girls. Building and exercising these forms of power contributes foundationally to the grantees’ work within and across key thematic outcome areas (e.g., violence prevention, improved services for survivors and strengthened laws/policies), shaping and fueling efforts to end violence in ways that can increase their reach, sustainability, local ownership and long-term impacts. The paper discusses potential benefits of employing a feminist/women’s movement-building approach in work to end violence against women and girls.

You can also read: "Feminist and Women's Movements in the Context of Ending Violence against Women and Girls - Implications for Funders and Grant Makers (an External Literature Review)