The price being paid

We see this price paid in the Middle East, where over 161 million women and girls are living in countries shattered by conflict, and over 1.6 million pregnant women are currently struggling to survive under the threat of escalating violence. In Lebanon and Gaza, displaced women are being forced to give birth in schools, cars, and overcrowded shelters with no clean water or medical support. We see it in the brutal invasion of Ukraine, where 2025 was the deadliest year for civilians since the invasion began, leaving over 5,000 women and girls dead.

And we see it in devastating, often overlooked crises elsewhere. In Sudan, women and girls are acutely food insecure, and sexual violence is being used systematically as a weapon of war. In Myanmar, the 2025 Human Rights Watch World Report highlighted how the military’s increasing use of airstrikes and drones targeting schools and displacement camps has killed pregnant women and children. In Haiti, gang violence has turned the lives of girls into a nightmare of abduction and sexual abuse. These are civilians losing their families and their futures for reasons they did not cause and cannot control.

A thought for the groups helping women

My heart aches for the civil society organizations working on the ground. When the headlines fade and international attention shifts, local and women-led organizations soldier on in the rubble. They are doing more than delivering aid, they are performing a profound act of resistance by reconfiguring trust and community where it has been shattered.

In Ukraine, organizations like Women and Girls Safe Space serve as critical lifelines for women survivors of violence, providing essential services ranging from psychological aid and legal support to hygiene vouchers. Despite facing persistent rolling blackouts and heating cuts, these groups continue to reach vulnerable populations that larger international agencies often cannot. Similarly, in Sudan, grassroots groups such as Nuba Women for Education and Development and the Sudan Women Development Organization are training women’s peace committees and documenting human rights violations under the constant threat of bombardment.

This frontline resistance extends to Haiti, where organizations like Nègès Mawon, Kay Fanm, and Solidarite Fanm Ayisyèn undertake the grueling work of documenting sexual violence and protecting survivors in gang-controlled areas where few others dare to go. Meanwhile, in Lebanon, groups like Haven for Artists and Fe-Male have been offering psychosocial support and well-being programs to address the urgent needs of women and adolescent girls.

Their work is the bedrock of any sustainable peace, yet they are being driven toward collapse. A staggering 90% of women’s organizations were hit by global funding cuts in 2025. In Ukraine alone, one in three women-led organizations warn they may not survive another six months under current funding levels.

Yet we must acknowledge that their labor is what keeps the light on when the world looks the other way!

What about women’s rights and justice during conflict?

Here we are in Women’s Month 2026. The UN’s theme “Rights. Justice. Action. For ALL Women and Girls” is a fundamental demand, but today it feels like a bitter irony. How can we speak of “rights” when millions of women and girls live in or within 50 kilometers of an active conflict zone, where the most basic right, the right to life, is under daily threat? How can we celebrate “justice” when the Secretary-General’s own 2026 report reveals that women globally hold only 64 percent of the legal rights of men, and that in over half the world’s countries, rape is still not defined by consent?

There is a profound hypocrisy in calling for “action” while global military spending continues to reach record highs, often at the direct expense of the very humanitarian aid and local women’s movements that keep communities from collapsing. Justice systems are failing women everywhere, leaving them exposed to abuse and impunity while we wait an estimated 286 years to close legal protection gaps.

For the woman in Gaza, the girl in Sudan or the survivor in Haiti, “rights” on paper mean nothing if they are not enforceable both in the streets where they live and by international legal mechanisms. This theme must not be a hollow slogan. It must be a reckoning. A justice system, whether local or international, that fails half the population, especially during their most vulnerable moments of crisis, cannot claim to uphold justice at all

A demand to cease the violence

The days of “humbly” calling upon world leaders are gone. I have seen where humble requests for peace lead. They lead to record-breaking military budgets and the systematic erasure of women’s lives. Today, I demand that those in power look past the cold calculations of political interest and recognize the human faces of those they have abandoned. This is a fundamental obligation of leadership.

It is time to move beyond the rhetoric of compassion and into the discipline of protection. We must stop treating the destruction of human dignity as a necessary byproduct of statecraft.

This Women’s Month, we refuse to settle for the mere absence of war. We demand a peace that is defined by the active presence of justice. True action begins with an immediate cessation of violence and the redirection of resources from the machinery of death to the local, women-led organizations that are currently holding the world together. We are watching, documenting, and we are holding you accountable.

Justice for ALL women and girls is a debt that is long overdue.