16 Days of Activism 2025 Recap: Reclaiming Our Rights
Every year, Equality Bahamas hosts a series of events during the Global 16 Days Campaign (also known as 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence) every year. This year, our theme was is Reclaiming Our Rights.
This year, over the course of 16 days from November 25 to December 10, we explored this theme with local Bahamian, Caribbean, and global activists and experts and a variety of events in-person in Nassau and online.
November 26 – Reclaiming Memory with The Bahamas National Reparations Committee
Our first event was with the Chair of The Bahamas National Reparations Committee. At the Future of Democracy Conference in October 2025, there was a session that focused on the “forgetting” that has taken place and is taking place among Afro-descendant people in The Bahamas and what the means for the national and regional demand for reparations. We talked about the need to (re)connect with our shared history and memory, understanding its relevance to where we are today, the challenges we face, and how we move forward in demanding our rights and reparations.
November 27 – Two-Faced: Gender Inequality in The Bahamas – Film Screening
Despite marketing itself as a world-class tourist destination and the gem of the Caribbean, The Bahamas has had the highest incidence of rape per capita in the WORLD consistently since 2007. Two-Faced: Gender Inequality in The Bahamas, a Gina Rodgers-Sealy film, is a documentary that explores this rape culture, a constitution that discriminates against women, the lack of women’s right in the country, their refusal to criminalize marital rape and the root cause of gender inequality in the country. We hosted this screening at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas.
December 2 – Reclaiming Power: All We Want is Everything with Soraya Chemaly
The author’s latest book, All We Want is Everything, is a bold and urgent call to name and dismantle the systems that diminish our lives and to reimagine a world built on justice, care, and collective power. From private relationships to global politics, Chemaly shows how naming and refusing male supremacy is essential to resisting the forces tearing democracy apart.
December 3 – Reclaiming Recovery: People-Centered Disaster Preparedness
In September 2019, The Bahamas experienced the devastation of category five Hurricane Dorian. In October 2025, category five Hurricane Jamaica devastated Jamaica. As recovery efforts continue, it is becoming increasingly clear that people experience climate disaster differently. Women and girls, people with disabilities, LGBTQI+ people, elderly people, migrant people, and people experiencing poverty are among those who are disproportionately affected by disruption in electricity and water supply, displacement, loss of identity documents, and loss of employment.
Yemi Knight and Kendria Ferguson engaged us in conversation about disaster preparedness and the measures we need to take to ensure that it is inclusive, considering the specific circumstances of people who are situations of vulnerability and increased risk.
December 4 – Tiny Movements – A Film Screening and Discussion
We were honoured to have Director Laura Sweeney and Jenn Green, subject of the documentary, for a screening of this powerful short film about surviving domestic partner violence. The virtual screening was followed by a discussion.
This documentary is the telling of the story of her creation of Tiny Kitchen Dances project, her healing as she navigates the ongoing legal battle to protect herself and her children, the journey to hold her abuser accountable within the legal justice system, and moving forward as she works to rebuild her chosen life. Tiny Movements was played for the virtual audience, but is not available for on-demand viewing at this time.
December 6 – Reclaiming Stories: An Erasure Poetry Workshop with Sonia Farmer
Erasure poetry is the act of removing text from recorded material to create a new narrative. In this workshop at Poinciana Paper Press, we used texts around us–books, official reports, newspaper articles, speeches, manifestos, declarations, manuals, transcriptions, etc–to experiment with this technique.
December 6 – Reclaiming the Workplace with Suman Saurav & Keisha Ellis
Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and the changes it brought to the economy and the workplace, The Bahamas’ ratification of the International Labor Organization’s Convention 190 on Eliminating Violence and Harassment in the Workplace, and recent labor unrest in The Bahamas, we facilitated a conversation about the workplace, our rights, and our power to transform the space through coalition, leadership, law, policy, and practice. We explored the ways people have and can build feminist workplaces and foster solidarity among workers.
December 6 – Reclaiming Faith
Christian fundamentalism is rampant in The Bahamas as people weaponize a conservative, violent interpretation of Christianity against people in situations of vulnerability. It is frequently used to prevent progress in recognizing and realizing human rights for all, from the opposition to criminalizing marital rape to disruptions of Pride events. In this conversation with people of faith, we talk about human rights, ways to challenge fundamentalisms, and guidance for people want to support those who have been marginalized. We were joined by Noemi Uribe of UUSC and Reverend Jennifer Butler, Founder of Faith in Democracy.
December 7 – Reclaiming Textiles: A Papermaking Workshop with Sonia Farmer
We had a great time transforming our reclaimed textiles, whether it was a dress you were wearing when you received bad news, the shirt you were wearing when you experienced an act of violence, or a bloodstained pair of pants. We experienced the process of making paper, from shredding and beating the material to forming them anew into sheets of reclaimed paper.
December 9 – Reclaiming Health with Indira Martin
Our health is impacted by genetics and the decisions we make on a daily basis. Dr. Indira Martin is a biomedical scientist and Director of the National Reference Lab. In this discussion, she shared recent scientific advances related to self efficacy with regard to health. We spoke about epigenetics (and how our genes are altered by environmental factors and traumatic events such as the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Persons), the gut-brain axis, and good practices we can put in place to improve our health.
December 10 – Reclaiming Human Rights with Gaynel
We closed our Reclaiming Rights series for the Global 16 Days Campaign with a conversation about with Gaynel Curry, human rights expert, head of the law school at University of The Bahamas, and Independent Expert Member of the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent. The Bahamas has a history of acknowledging and leveraging international human rights standards. One clear example is the Bahamian women’s suffrage movement of the 1950s. Today, anti-rights actors suggest that human rights are foreign. We know, however, that they are universal, and that they need to be promoted, upheld, and expanded at all levels. In this session, Gaynel helped us to see human rights in the Bahamian context and made clear the importance of building a culture of human rights.