Amplifying Women’s Voices in a world that still silences them

Keynote address by Ambika Satkunanathan at the 16^th anniversary convening of the South Asian Women in Media – Sri Lanka (SAWM-SL) at the Mandarina Hotel in Colombo on October 1, 2025

The title of this convening, ‘Amplifying the Voices of Women’, is appropriate, but it is also cause for consternation. The title is appropriate because we are living in a time in history when globally, the progress made on gender equality is being reversed, and women are being erased from public life, and their rights and voices are being restricted through overt and covert means. Overtly, legal restrictions, policies and programs are actively excluding, discriminating and silencing women. Covertly, tools such as social media are being used to perpetrate violence against women and influence women to reject public life, a career and aspirations that extend beyond the home and domestic duties. You may have heard of the trad (traditional) wife phenomenon sweeping through social media, where young women are trying to influence other young women to reject careers, financial independence and any public life by glamourizing domestic labour.

Contrast this with the International Labour Organization’s finding in 2023, that 748 million people were not participating in the global labour force because of care responsibilities, accounting for a third of all working-age persons outside the labour force. Of these, 708 million were women and 40 million were men. The ILO stated, ‘‘This stark gender discrepancy highlights the disproportionate role that women take on in child-rearing, care, and support for persons with disabilities and those in need of long-term care, housekeeping, and other care responsibilities”. And this is why the title causes consternation- it is because in 2025, we are still trying to find ways to amplify women’s voices.

Just a few days ago, a YouTube channel called ‘Woman Shot AI’ that was dedicated entirely to showing AI-generated videos of women being shot in the head was taken down by YouTube after 404 Media exposed it. The channel had garnered nearly 200,000 views since it was created on June 20, 2025, so 200,000 people wanted to see women getting shot in the head in a short period of three months. Clearly, the guardrails on Google did not work because the creator was able to use Google VEO 3 to produce these videos. How should we respond to this? Yes, we need content moderation, but no amount of content moderation, which does not descend into censorship, can address this problem because there will always be new tools that will enable the exclusion and discrimination of, and violence against, women. How do we inoculate ourselves against this? The vaccine against such a phenomenon is acknowledging and addressing the root causes.

The root causes are the historical, structural and systemic barriers to women’s equality, which in 2025 have morphed into new and different forms of abuse and violence, such as cyber violence, that control, enable and perpetuate gender inequality.

To understand the barriers to women fully enjoying their rights, we must adopt an intersectional approach that will help us understand how the different elements of one’s identity- gender, ethnicity, religion, class, etc. can compound the inequalities and marginalisation one faces. This enables us to see clearly how certain elements of a person’s identity give power, while another element might rob the person of power to enjoy rights and engage actively in public processes. Women, therefore, experience multi-layered forms of oppression.

Discrimination and violence are viewed as phenomena that suddenly happen, but they exist on a continuum. The most discussed form of discrimination that women face is sexual violence. Sexual violence does not exist in a vacuum but is part of a continuum; it is a part of ‘everyday violence’, which we often fail to recognize. Everyday violence is a boss using abusive language or a school-teacher hitting a child, or violence by police when arresting someone or dealing with protestors.

The statement issued by the Chief Prelates of the 3 Buddhist chapters on Tuesday (Sept 30) opposing the ban on corporal punishment, because according to them it ‘could undermine cultural values and give rise to serious social catastrophes’, demonstrates how we have normalised violence against vulnerable people who don’t have power.

The constant and relentless process through which violence becomes firmly intertwined with everyday life normalises it and increases the threshold of what society will view as an acceptable level of violence. Slowly, it makes barbaric, inhuman behaviour acceptable, which undermines empathy and social cohesion.

The perpetrators of sexual violence are portrayed as evil and monsters- we do this because it makes it easier for us to deal with the fact that a human being is capable of such brutality and inhumanity. If we demonize an individual, it becomes easier for us to deny the entrenched and everyday nature of violence and to distance ourselves from it by saying, “a monster did it. No one I know would ever do such a thing”.

We focus on individuals who cause harm, and the default social reaction to brutal crimes is to call for the implementation of harsher punishments, often the death penalty. The people who demand harsher punishments are surprised that even after harsh punishment,s the violence continues.

Philosopher Judith Butler asks us to suspend judgment in such instances- she asks us not just to say they are terrible people but to ask, ‘how did that terribleness come about’?

Therefore, to find lasting solutions to further women’s equality, we must start asking the difficult questions. For instance, why are men violent towards women? Philosopher and legal scholar Martha Nussbaum uses the term ‘gender pride’ to explain the reason for men’s violence against women. She says, “More or less, what all men have for long centuries been raised to have is a sense they do not need to take the woman’s autonomy and her full subjective reality seriously. She is there as something to serve their interest”.

When a man refuses to see women as autonomous persons with equal rights, it leads to objectification, i.e. the woman becomes a thing that can be harassed, abused and subjected to lewd jokes. Anthropologist Veena Das states that violence, particularly sexual violence, directed at women and children tends to be the dominant form of communication to assert the right to claim the entitlements the male body has been promised. If she objects, she faces reprisals. The reprisals women face range from being ridiculed for not having a sense of humour and labelled a man-hater, to being killed for resisting rape and sexual harassment.

To understand and address discrimination and violence against women, we must inquire into the construction of masculinity.

What does society’s notion of masculinity expect and demand of men? What are the direct and indirect means through which men are taught how to be men? How does that impact men? Being brutal, violent and sexist adversely impacts men too. Veena Das describes it thus: ‘The blows of the sculptor’s chisel which define the outlines of the manhood, leave many scars which cannot be smothered over by the unrealizable dreams of future rewards as part of male dominion’.

The need to feel safe and secure lies at the core of efforts to ensure women can enjoy their rights. In our efforts, we look at the law to protect us and enable us to exercise our rights. However, “the Rule of Law, despite its pretensions of objectivity and neutrality, is also a system of power. It includes and excludes people, it disciplines and punishes, and it fosters certain values and attitudes, encasing them in a belief that they are time-honoured and eternal”. A truth often denied but is evidenced by historical practice is that the application of a law or policy is shaped, unfortunately, by the biases and prejudices of those applying them. After relying on legal reform to bring about social change for decades, advocates, activists, and scholars are re-examining the potential of the law to bring about substantive change and its ability to challenge dominant norms because norms on which the law is founded are also patriarchal and contain inherent class, caste, and religious biases.

The criminal justice system is supposed to be a sanctuary for those who experience injustice, but what happens in practice can be the opposite of that- how can we change that? The way we imagine justice impacts what we expect of justice and what we do to obtain justice. For example, in 2020, a statue of Medusa holding the head of Perseus was installed across the street from Manhattan’s criminal courthouse in New York. Although the statue was supposed to be a tribute to the ‘MeToo’ movement and aimed to subvert the victim-blaming narrative, it was challenged by many, including the woman who started the ‘MeToo’ movement, Tarana Burke, because it was seen as depicting justice as revenge and retribution.

 Critics have also pointed out that the woman’s body looks like it has been imagined and sculpted by a man – I came across a quote that says ‘it is nothing more than yet another naked female figure made by yet another white male artist’.

I see this episode as a metaphor for the failure to address the systemic and structural factors that cause inequality and violence, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because the actual story is that it is Poseidon, one of the three main male Gods in Greek mythology, who raped Medusa in Goddess Athena’s temple. This was seen as a transgression by Athena, who did nothing to Poseidon but turned Medusa into a monster with snakes in her head and the ability to turn men into stone. So, this is not only an ultimate victim-blaming but a victim-punishing story. Therefore, even in creating a tribute to the ‘MeToo’ movement and trying to slip the victim-blaming narrative, it seems the effort was unsuccessful in identifying and depicting the root causes of violence against women.

During a growing global anti-rights movement/backlash, the justice system, which is supposed to provide remedies, is being increasingly weaponized to control the public. Countries all over the world are routinely deploying law enforcement, courts, and prisons against the poor, the marginalized, dissenters, journalists and political opponents for reasons that have little to do with ensuring safety or delivering justice. While states protect the boundaries of wealth, privilege, power, and status, such as billionaires and oligarchs, people continue to be imprisoned for the inability to pay fines, in Sri Lanka, as little as LKR 3000; people are sentenced to death in many parts of the world because they cannot access competent legal representation.

What happens to institutions that are supposed to provide remedies and justice to women when we don’t address patriarchy and misogyny?

An independent review of the International Criminal Court released in 2020 says that ‘they also heard frequent complaints … [of an] adversarial [workplace culture that is] implicitly discriminatory against women. They

heard a number of accounts of sexual harassment, notably uninvited and unwanted sexual advances from more senior male staff to their female subordinates. Female interns seemed to be particularly vulnerable to such approaches …”

“In the Experts’ assessment, there is a general reluctance, if not extreme fear, among many staff to report any alleged act of misconduct or misbehaviour by a Judge (and in general, by a senior official). The perception is that they are all immune” (para 302). These ladies and gentlemen were at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. This demonstrates that when we don’t address the root causes of inequality and violence, structures, systems and processes that are supposed to provide remedies also become infected by misogyny and sexism, and make women’s struggle for justice even more difficult.

When we speak of solutions, economic growth, wealth creation and technology are touted as solutions to gender inequality, but they will not automatically provide solutions unless we address the existing inequalities, which will be reproduced in different ways.

For instance, how will a war affected, woman with little education or marketable skills and who has lost her assets and has to meet the needs of her 3 children fare in an economic system that ignores existing structural and systemic inequalities and discrimination? An example of this is the opening of banks and finance companies in the war-affected North and East of Sri Lanka after the war, which targeted women heads of households to provide loans and micro-credit. Women with limited financial literacy and below poverty line incomes mortgaged their sparse assets to begin income generation activities that were not profitable because they do not cater to market needs or gaps, and the women were not connected to marketing networks. The failure to pay the loan led to women experiencing severe harassment from the loan recovery officers, resulting in even suicides.

Social perceptions of what is appropriate behaviour of women shape public reaction to women’s responses to inequality and violence. This is why we need to understand how power and power structures work and how women negotiate their place within and with those structures. For instance, when speaking of equality or the need to include women, we don’t use the word patriarchy of feminism- who do you think this is? It is because to engage with those in power, to be acceptable and not be seen as crazy feminists, we have couched our activism in socially acceptable, less threatening language. This is strategic, BUT along the way, by doing this, have we lost sight of what we’re challenging?

Jennifer Doudna, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2020, said in an interview with National Geographic that until her 40s, she did not want to self-identify as a feminist because she didn’t want special privileges but wanted to be assessed for her capabilities. She feared that identifying as a feminist would lead to her being labelled or being viewed as less than capable and as someone seeking special treatment. This is an example of the extent to which we have been socialised to internalise and normalise oppression and inequality. I would call feminism the eternal F word- it always has been and has been viewed and portrayed, particularly by the media, as negative, and as a danger to social stability and families. Ultimately, what is feminism? Feminism is saying we want equality and equity.

Instead, we are told that to challenge sexism, we need to fit within certain social expectations of women. Appropriate behaviour for women, that is

taught and told, in direct and indirect ways, to girls and young women is to tolerate causal sexism and everyday acts of discrimination, disrespect and micro-aggression. Generally, women’s anger is perceived to be dangerous and undesirable, and women who show anger are labelled hysterical, unstable or emotional. Women’s anger as a response to casual everyday sexism, normally encountered in the form of sexist jokes, or men speaking over women, is met with derision and viewed as ‘over-reaction’. In a discussion a few years ago, one of the questions posed was, ‘How can we raise these issues and not be seen as angry and bossy? ’ The author Sarah Kuhnsays that during childhood, she was taught that her anger was a monster she had to control. It is only much later that she came to realise her anger stemmed from the fact ‘I was also fighting daily battles that were invisible to me, wars I did not realise were wars…microaggressions, macroaggressions…just plain old aggressions’. She says that:

She needed to learn that anger is not an inherently bad emotion. She needed to know that it is powerful, justified, and necessary. That she is responding correctly to injustice or someone trying to hurt her or harm done to people she loves. That so much of what makes her angry is worthy of that anger.

Kuhn recalls the ‘everyday moments. The things that are supposedly inconsequential. The moments where I’d laughed something off or acted like it wasn’t a big deal because I was so used to it. How many of us have done the same thing by ignoring or laughing off a comment or action we felt was disrespectful or sexist? Even supposedly liberal and progressive circles are not exceptions to the normalization of casual sexism, which is tolerated, sometimes even indulged, because ‘boys will be boys’.

In this world that seems to be falling apart, a world in which we are greeted with near-apocalyptic news every day, how do we move beyond a feeling of paralysis and panic? People fear that the world as we know it is ending, and they say it as if it is a negative thing. Brazilian philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva says that she is invested in the world as we know ending, because she says, ‘I don’t see how we will be able to exist otherwise’. She goes on to say, “This new world will have to be rebuilt and recuperated from the destruction caused by the extractive tools and mechanisms of global capital.” Some people, such as poor, marginalised communities, have never lived in this world that you and I inhabit- they have always existed in the margins, being ignored, exploited. To them, a new world gives hope that they, too, will be able to enjoy the rights to which they are entitled.

Judith Butler says that, ‘Imagining the future beyond the end of this world is part of what it means to live life now. This does not, in my view, entail a negation of this world, but only a critical interrogation of the limits of the imaginable in light of radical democratic claims.

In a reconstructed, re-imagined world, concepts such as solidarity and self-care will be interwoven in our strategies and practice. In this new world, women will not fall into the trap of defining their needs within patriarchal value systems. They will not view the need for emotional care as weak. They will accept that they are not superhuman or invincible but are very much human. Women will know that we, too, need support, and needing or asking for it is not weak. Strength lies in seeking help when needed and solidarity.

– Ambika Satkunanathan is a human rights advocate who has worked with persons and communities impacted by human rights violations, especially in the conflict-affected North and East, and assisted them with accessing remedies. She has previously held the positions of Commissioner of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka and a Legal Advisor to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Ambika is Chairperson of the Neelan Tiruchelvam Trust, a local grantmaking organization in Sri Lanka and was a founder member and Vice Chairperson of Urgent Action Fund- Asia and Pacific, a feminist regional grantmaking organization