Combating Violence Against Women in the EU Through Intersectional Advocacy

In 2024, the EU Directive (2024/1385) on Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence was adopted. The Directive prescribes legal changes to be made by EU Member States with the goal of codifying the commitment to preventing and combatting violence against women outlined in the Istanbul Convention. Strikingly, the Directive calls for member states to legislate “targeted support for victims with intersectional needs and groups at risk,” thus acknowledging that violence against women is gender but also race, disability and class discrimination. This paper investigates how this intersectionally oriented support could be realized through the lens of the activists at these intersectionally marginalized social positions. As EU Member States work to transpose the Directive into law, activist groups have made calls to action and begun campaigns to affect the transposition process across the region. We investigate the actions of these groups to understand how calls for intersectionally informed policy making are championed. To do so we utilize Perez Brower’s (2024) concept of intersectional advocacy which describes the process of intersectionally marginalized activists linking different policies and issues areas together to meet their needs. In engaging with the concept of intersectional advocacy we seek to both substantively understand the actions of advocates in realizing the Directive while also theoretically engaging with questions of how an intersectional concept can travel from its origins in the US to a European context. We ask what kinds of challenges arise when intersectionality is taken up in different contexts and how this changes the nature of both activism and policymaking.