Eradicating Violence and Discrimination to Achieve a Care Society: Equality Now at the XVI Regional Conference on Women

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In the second week of August 2025, government representatives, feminist leaders, UN agencies, and civil society organisations will gather in Mexico City for the XVI Regional Conference on Women (CRM), organised by ECLAC and UN Women.

For Equality Now and our allies in Latin America and the Caribbean, this is a key opportunity to amplify local struggles on the regional stage, demand concrete commitments from States, and advance feminist proposals to achieve legal equality, economic justice, and an end to sexual violence.

The CRM, held every three years, is the main United Nations intergovernmental forum on women’s rights and gender equality in Latin America and the Caribbean. This edition’s central theme is: “political, economic, social, cultural and environmental transformations as a means of advancing the care society and gender equality”.

At Equality Now, we believe that it is not possible to build a true care society while legal inequality, economic injustice, and violence against women, girls, and adolescents persist. Thirty years after the Beijing Platform for Action and the Belém do Pará Convention, we urge the region’s States to dismantle the structural barriers that prevent the guarantee of the right to care: women’s subordination in laws, the unequal distribution of unpaid care work, and impunity for violence. These inequalities compound over a woman’s lifetime and restrict access to fundamental rights.

This conference is a pivotal moment to advance these transformations, with political will, legal reforms, and the active participation of women and girls in all their diversity. That’s why we are here with a regional delegation to raise visibility and advocate for change.

Our priorities: why we are here

Equality Now arrives at the CRM with a diverse delegation of young activists, legislators, legal experts on sexual violence and family law, and allied organisations from across the region. Together, we aim to:

• Influence the States’ final declaration, securing concrete commitments on sexual violence, discrimination in the law, and child, early, and forced marriage and unions.

• Elevate our allies as key actors in defending the rights of women, girls, and adolescents, highlighting their expertise, proposals, and intersectional voices in political dialogue spaces, side events, and coverage.

• Link local struggles to regional agendas, showing how obstacles in family law, access to justice, or redistribution of care translate into shared demands.

• Strengthen the public presence of Equality Now as a convener of alliances and promoter of feminist legal reforms in the LAC region.

Read our position statement.

Equality Now at the Conference

Throughout the week, the Equality Now delegation and our allies will take part in side events, meetings, advocacy actions, and activities of the Feminist Forum at the XVI CRM. Key moments include:

Pre-conference articulation:

Dialogue: “Keys to Sustaining and Advancing Care as a Right at the Regional Conference on Women.” In June, we hosted this discussion for feminist networks and organisations in the lead-up to the XVI CRM, reflecting on the challenges and intersections between unpaid care work, economic injustice, and gender-based violence.

Cafecito on the Road to the CRM: In July and August, we held two editions of this virtual gathering with feminist allies from across the region to exchange political tools, refine shared strategies, and prepare collectively for the conference.

Feminist Forum
Since January, Equality Now has actively participated in this regional political and intersectional coordination space, led by more than 200 Afro-descendant, Indigenous, community-based, trade union, LBTIQ+, youth, and local organisations from across Latin America and the Caribbean. This feminist coordinating body has worked collectively through thematic commissions to prepare the Feminist Forum for the XVI CRM and to craft a strong civil society declaration, with concrete proposals in response to authoritarian setbacks, structural violence, gender inequalities, and an economic model that undermines rights and must be transformed to achieve a care society.

Equality Now has been part of organising the Forum, contributing to the coordination of collective efforts to ensure the diverse voices of women and youth are heard in the official spaces of the Conference. We will be present from the Forum’s opening, held the day before the CRM begins, participating in panels and dialogue spaces, bringing our proposals alongside those of our allies, and reinforcing the collective call for a genuine care society.

Our delegation

We are proud to participate in this conference alongside a network of allies from across the region: legislators such as Senator Virginia Velazco (Bolivia) and Representative Jenifer Pedraza (Colombia), defenders of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples’ human rights, legal and justice experts, young activists, and grassroots feminist leaders.

All of them bring to the regional stage concrete demands built from their territories and communities, such as access to justice in cases of sexual and gender-based violence, the protection of children and adolescents, the recognition and redistribution of unpaid care work, the guarantee of sexual and reproductive rights, and the defense of the rights of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, adolescent, and youth women. Their agendas range from economic justice for women caregivers to responses to the worsening political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental crises that threaten human rights progress in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Eradicating violence and combating discrimination are essential steps toward building a true care society and achieving gender equality in the region.

Join the conversation and follow our work:

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