The Wadadli Initiative for Self-care and Healing (WISH) today joins the global community in launching the annual 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, under this year’s UNiTE campaign theme: “UNiTE to End Digital Violence Against All Women and Girls.”
As digital abuse rapidly becomes one of the most widespread and harmful forms of gender-based violence, 2025’s theme emphasizes the urgent need to address online harassment, image-based abuse, cyberstalking, deepfake pornography, doxxing, and the growing manipulation of digital tools to harm women and girls.
The 16-day campaign, running from November 25 (International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women) to December 10 (Human Rights Day), is a powerful reminder that gender-based violence, online or offline, is not a “private matter” but a public health crisis, a human rights issue, and a profound threat to mental wellbeing.
This year’s theme underscores how digital violence disproportionately affects women with public visibility, including activists, journalists, women in politics, creators, and young women navigating social media spaces. It also highlights that online abuse often leads to offline harm, including coercion, intimidation, physical violence, and long-term psychological trauma.
WISH’s 2025 focus aligns with the global call to strengthen digital safety, challenge harmful online behaviours, and demand accountability from platforms, institutions, and systems that enable abuse.
“We cannot speak honestly about mental health in Antigua and Barbuda without confronting the reality of gender-based violence, especially the digital forms that are becoming harder to escape,” said Chaneil Imhoff, Founder of WISH. “Every day, women and girls are navigating cyberbullying, threats, image-based abuse, and online humiliation that follow them everywhere they go. Digital violence leaves deep emotional scars and can lead to real-life harm. This year’s 16 Days of Activism is a call to break that silence, centre survivors, and build systems that protect rather than punish.”
Throughout the 16 Days, WISH will be using its platforms to amplify the voices of survivors, advocates, and digital rights champions working to create safer online spaces.
WISH is also encouraging workplaces, schools, parents, youth groups, faith-based institutions, and community leaders to take action by:
- Hosting digital-safety conversations and training sessions.
- Reviewing policies around online harassment, data protection, and reporting mechanisms.
- Supporting organizations that provide counselling, legal support, and psychosocial care to survivors of digital violence.
“Ending gender-based violence, whether online or offline, is not the responsibility of survivors but the responsibility of all of us,” Imhoff added. “We need families who listen and believe, workplaces that protect, institutions that act, and communities that refuse to normalise online abuse. If we say we care about mental health, then we must also care about the digital environments that are causing harm. This is the moment for us to move from awareness to action.”
WISH is urging the public to use the 16 Days to educate themselves, speak up safely, and stand in solidarity with survivors, while remembering that digital safety is essential to gender equality.
“These 16 days are a catalyst, but our commitment must be year-round,” said Imhoff. “Our vision is a society where no one has to choose between their safety, their sanity, and their survival. Antigua and Barbuda can be that place, but only if we decide together that violence has no home here.”
Members of the public are invited to follow WISH’s social media pages (https://www.instagram.com/wishwadadli) for resources, stories, and digital safety tools, as well as practical steps to support survivors and challenge harmful online norms.
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