“Clearly escalating patterns” of misogyny and violence against women and girls in the aftermath of Brexit are the focus of a new campaign launched by the Young European Movement (YEM) UK.
Cecilia Jastrzembska, the president and co-director of YEM, has called the present moment a “critical juncture” because of the dual threat of the radicalisation of young men and the rise in male violence motivated by misogyny.
YEM member Juliet Armstrong said: “The backdrop of a Trump presidency systematically gutting women’s rights and the rise of male violence against women globally makes it more important than ever for all citizens to call out and take action for gender equality. In deeply worrying times like these, we need multilateral cooperation and stronger female networks.”
The Break the Silence to End the Violence campaign aims to destigmatise discussions around gender-based violence and to call on the UK government to ensure that laws surrounding this type of violence are recognised, monitored and treated appropriately.
The campaign was launched officially on 23 January in partnership with the European Parliament at Europe House in London. Along with the campaign, YEM co-launched the new YEM Women’s and European Movement Women’s Networks on 7 March ahead of International Women’s Day.
The impact of Brexit on misogyny
YEM members have pointed to Brexit as an often-overlooked factor in the rollback of protections for women and girls in the UK. Leaving the EU meant the UK lost automatic access to the Schengen Information System, Europol, and Eurojust which share real-time data about criminal activities, including sexual violence. The UK is also no longer subject to the European Arrest Warrant, a tool which facilitated arrests across EU member states. According to Jastrzembska this has meant “perpetrators not just slip through gaps but widen them.”
She said: “When we’re connected we’re stronger because we’re better informed. It’s something that has gone so under the radar. We talk about defence, we talk about security, we talk about trade, business, and who’s paying more for exports, but on a literal life or death level our rug was pulled out from under us.”
Caoimhe Clements, a freelance journalist, has also written about the numerous ways that women in the UK now have fewer protections than women in the EU. The EU has developed a comprehensive gender strategy for 2020-2025, focusing on areas such as data collection, raising awareness, strengthening legal frameworks, providing support services and holding perpetrators accountable. The European protection order offers further safeguards by enabling women who have experienced domestic violence to seek shelter in another EU country.
Brexit meant that UK women not only lost access to these measures, they also lost access to funding schemes such as the Rights, Equality, and Citizenship Programme which helps ensure that the rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, such as gender equality, are properly implemented. In 2023 the UK ranked 22nd on the gender inequality index according to the World Economic Forum, behind several EU countries such as Finland, Germany and Sweden.
Policy changes and misogyny
There has been an historic challenge in discussing gender equality at the national level of UK politics, and Jastrzembska said the country needs to adopt more robust policies, better reporting and harsher punishments to address gender-based violence.
She said: “We haven’t joined the dots. We have not linked up the fact that misogyny is a clearly escalating pattern. Almost every high-profile murder in the last three years you could track back to other little incidents that weren’t put in a database and reported as misogynistic. We need to take up a prevention-based approach.”
Jastrzembska would like to see better implementation of the Istanbul Convention, a Council of Europe human rights treaty opposing violence against women which the UK ratified in 2022, in addition to increased cooperation and improved data and information sharing between the UK and EU.
She said: “Obviously we left. So it’s up to us to figure out how we navigate these quite uncharted waters.”
Blame and accountability
The role of men is also an important factor in the campaign as the resurgence of “toxic machismo culture” has led to identity politics and the genders pitted against each other. Jastrzembska said young boys and men need to be engaged and taught about consent and respect, not just girls.
She said: “Men have to be active allies. They have to listen to women and ask them what they can actively do to make them feel safer. Call out bad behaviour, call out misogyny, and not just be passive bystanders because silence is compliance.
“That’s where ‘break the silence, end the violence comes from’. That complicity that happens when we don’t do anything and we don’t nip misogyny in the bud so it doesn’t retreat.”
Jastrzembska pointed out the responsibility of the media in shifting the blame from women to men, and said she would like to see the onus of responsibility for stopping violence be shifted from the victims onto the men who perpetrate it.
She said “Silence is how this poison spreads. Women are relentlessly and aggressively conditioned to manage male violence, buy alarms, adjust their routines and take ridiculous precautionary measures. Only yesterday I saw a headline blaming ‘unlit parks’ for women feeling unsafe to run at night. It’s misogynists taking advantage of unlit places to harass and violate women. Lack of light is not the cause.”
Jastrzembska said she hopes this campaign will encourage dialogue between EU and UK experts, officials and young people to create social and legal changes towards eradicating gender-based violence.
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