Today is the first day of the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence 2025 campaign and The Pixel Project is kicking things off with our 10th annual list of 16 female role models fighting to end violence against women in their communities. The intent of this list is simple: to highlight the good work of the heroines of the movement to end violence against women wherever they are in the world. The women in this year’s list hail from 16 countries and 5 continents.
Many of these outstanding women have shown that it is possible to transform personal pain that came out of facing gender-based violence, into positive action to stop violence against women, empower themselves, and show other survivors that it is possible to move forward with dignity and happiness. They have refused to let bitterness and pain get the better of them, opting to stand up for themselves and for other women and girls instead.
Others on this list may not have experienced gender-based violence themselves but have stepped up to do what is right: to speak up for women and girls who cannot do it for themselves, sometimes at great personal risk. All this requires immense courage, generosity of spirit and a strong enduring heart.
Without further ado, here in alphabetical order by first name is our 2025 list of 16 female role models. We hope that these women will be an inspiration to others to get involved with the cause. To that end, we hope you will generously share this list via Facebook and Instagram to give these extraordinary 16 women and their work a moment in the sun.
It’s time to stop violence against women. Together.
Note: Information for all role model profiles is sourced via online research and is based on one or more news sources, articles and/or The Pixel Project’s own interviews with them. The main articles/reports from which these profiles have been sourced can be directly accessed via the hyperlinked titles. Please do click through to learn more about these remarkable women.
Written, researched and compiled by Regina Yau.
Inspired to support The Pixel Project’s anti-violence against women work? Make a donation to us today OR buy our 1st poetry collection, Under Her Eye. All donations and net proceeds from book sales go towards supporting our campaigns, programmes, and initiatives.
Female Role Model 1: Bijaya Rai Shrestha – Nepal
Bijaya Rai Shrestha, a former undocumented migrant worker in Japan, is the executive director of Nepal’s Returnee Women Migrant Workers’ Group (Aaprabasi Mahila Kamdar Samuha, AMKAS). She founded AMKAS to support and empower returnee migrant women while also advocating for systemic change for the welfare of female Nepali migrant workers. She said in an interview with Human Rights Watch: “Gender-based violence is the main reason most women migrants suffer, which impacts their lives and wellbeing. Being a leader of an organisation of returnee women migrants, women migrants’ safety, security, and well-being is my priority. My mission and goal are to one day see women migrants enjoying all their basic human rights without abuse and exploitation in their world of work.”
Female Role Model 2: Branislava Arađan – Serbia
Branislava Arađan, a law graduate and human rights activist, founded a non-governmental organisation that focused on gender equality, advocacy, campaigning, and digital safety for girls. In November 2021, she became a Project and Youth Ambassador Coordinator at the Women Against Violence Europe (WAVE) Network where she provides key support for their “I am Women/Girl in Cyberspace” campaign and other key initiatives. She said: “One major misconception about online harassment is that it is a gender-neutral issue, but it disproportionately affects girls and young women. […] Another misconception is that online violence is regularly seen as a one-time incident, when in reality, it often is a continuum of abuse that begins in real life and is amplified through digital means. This highlights the deep connection between online and offline forms of violence, both rooted in systemic gender-based discrimination against women and inequality.”
Female Role Model 3: Bukky Shonibare – Nigeria
Bukky Shonibare is the co-founder of the #BringBackOurGirls movement which was launched after 276 Chibok schoolgirls were abducted in northern Nigeria by Boko Haram in 2014. Shonibare directed global awareness to the issue by holding up a placard daily over five years regardless of where she was in the world. Today, she is a Ph.D student at the University of Toronto where her research focuses on the intersection of law, policymaking, and technologies to ensure justice for women and girls who are survivors of sexual violence. In light of the reality that “one of the problems for survivors of sexual violence is sometimes you don’t want to talk to a human being who will judge you”, she is working on using an AI-powered virtual assistant she has named Keepit to help gather and preserve survivors’ testimonies so that they will have the option of pursuing legal action against their abusers in the future.
Female Role Model 4: Choi Mal-Ja – South Korea
In 1964, when she was 18 years old, Choi Mal-ja bit off part of her attacker’s tongue as he tried to rape her. Instead of getting justice, she was sentenced to 10 months in prison for defending herself against the perpetrator while the man was sentenced to six months in prison and was never convicted of attempted rape. For over six decades, she lived with a criminal record for her act of self-defence. Then, inspired by the country’s #MeToo movement, she campaigned for years to have her conviction overturned. In 2025, she made history on two fronts – in July 2025, prosecutors in South Korea made a public and official apology to her for failing her case and on 10 September 2025, she was acquitted of the original charge of committing grievous bodily harm. She said: “I could not let this case go unanswered… I [wanted] to stand up for other victims who share the same fate as mine.”
Female Role Model 5: Fatou Baldeh – Gambia
Fatou Baldeh is a survivor of female genital mutilation (FGM) and the founder of the organisation Women in Liberation & Leadership (WILL). When Gambian parliamentarians pushed to overturn the ban on FGM in the country, Baldeh, one of the leading anti-FGM campaigners in Gambia, fought back. She and WILL collaborated with other women’s organisations to connect with survivors and discuss the issue with religious leaders. They also conducted a national study to document the health impacts of FGM and presented that evidence to politicians. Consequently, Gambia’s parliament rejected the bill in July 2024. Baldeh told Time magazine: “People are talking about it, and that is a positive thing because we cannot end the practice if we don’t talk about it.”
Female Role Model 6: Gisele Pelicot – France
When Gisele Pelicot discovered that her ex-husband had been regularly drugging her over the course of a decade and inviting scores of men from their area to rape her while she was unconscious, she waived her anonymity in order to open what became France’s largest rape trial to the public. Her goal was to make “shame swap sides” from the victim to the rapist. Her courage in the face of rape culture and victim-blaming made her an instant feminist icon worldwide. In France, her case has certainly planted the seeds of change, prodding the general public to examine their attitudes towards men’s sexual violence and rape victims while becoming a springboard for discussions about consent, misogyny, and sexism.
Female Role Model 7: Irene Cari – Argentina
Irene Cari is an indigenous activist from the province of Salta in northern Argentina who founded the Women’s Forum for Equal Opportunities, an association which supports women and girls experiencing abuse. She was also a member of the Civil Society Advisory Group of the United Nations Spotlight Initiative, which funds grassroots programmes to end violence against women and girls worldwide. She has rigorously campaigned for better and more progressive legislation against violence against women including femicide and violence against indigenous women, saying: “The voices of Indigenous women cannot be silenced as these sexual violations [persist]…It wasn’t until 2009, when the Law No. 26,485 was passed, that we were able to speak out more on this issue.” Her work also puts an emphasis on the economic empowerment of women, “since equality includes overcoming women’s poverty.”
Female Role Model 8: Jeaninne Niyoyankunze – Burundi
Jeaninne Niyoyankunze is a Burundian refugee living in Rwanda who uses her passion for drama and filmmaking to raise awareness about the challenges refugees face, including violence against women. Through her films, she champions the resilience of women and girls in times of displacement. She takes a hands-on role in every part of the production of her films to ensure that she does justice to every story she tells. She told UNHCR: “I decided to convey my messages through film because it’s a unique medium and engaging. Through film, I can draw attention to issues like gender-based violence, reaching a wider audience and creating a lasting impact. When a film is screened, anyone can watch it – even those who might not initially be interested. The images and sounds stay with you, making the issue impossible to ignore.”
Female Role Model 9: Juliana Laguna Trujillo – Colombia
Juliana Laguna Trujillo was an attorney at Women’s Link Worldwide and currently serves as a Legal and Advocacy Officer at Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice. She led the team that championed a survivor who was recruited by an illegal armed group as a child –and later coerced to take contraceptives and have an abortion — in her fight for reparations before Colombia’s national courts. Following Trujillo’s thorough and tireless legal advocacy on behalf of the survivor, the Constitutional Court of Colombia issued a landmark decision in December 2019 that granted the survivor access to comprehensive reparations as an ex-combatant victim. She writes in a blog post for the London School of Economics: “Reproductive violence continues to be insufficiently addressed in transitional justice mechanisms around the world, but we hope this changes in the coming years, particularly because victims continue to be at risk of reproductive violence and deserve justice, reparation and non-repetition measures.”
Female Role Model 10: Natalie Fleet – United Kingdom
Labour MP Natalie Fleet was 15 when she was groomed by an older man and conceived her eldest daughter. It was only years later that she realised that it was statutory rape. She now campaigns tirelessly for other survivors of statutory rape in parliament. Alongside her advocacy work as an MP, Fleet is also working to set up the first charity in the UK that supports families with children conceived by rape. She told The Guardian: “My absolute dream is that, by the end of this period in government, I’ll be able to tell any woman who comes to me that she’ll have an MP who believes her, a police force that will understand, each with a designated specially trained officer, a court system without a backlog and space in prison for perpetrators to serve a full sentence.”
Female Role Model 11: Pallabi Ghosh – India
Pallabi Ghosh is a formidable activist from Assam who has made it her life’s work to combat and campaign against a wide range of gender-based violence since she became an advocate in 2012. Over the course of more than a decade, she worked with law enforcement to rescue over 10,000 women and girls from traffickers. In 2020, she founded the Impact and Dialogue Foundation and spent two years conducting extensive door-to-door outreach across West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Bihar to uncover the root causes of trafficking in these regions. Aside from discovering that poverty, lack of education, vulnerability, and unemployment were significant causes, she also exposed the fact that a major catalyst for trafficking was the lack of immediate conviction and stringent anti-trafficking laws, ensuring that traffickers continued to operate with impunity.
Female Role Model 12: Sahra Mani – Afghanistan
Afghan filmmaker Sahra Mani is an award-winning filmmaker and former lecturer at Kabul University whose work as a producer and director has had a huge impact on women’s rights, equality, and justice in Afghanistan and across the world. Her documentary, A Thousand Girls Like Me, about sexual abuse and incest in an Afghan family, was screened at many film festivals and won more than 25 awards worldwide. More recently, her 2024 documentary Bread & Roses showcased how young women in Afghanistan refused to be silenced and recorded themselves facing down the Taliban in the streets. This documentary first began to take shape when Mani, working in exile, started receiving such videos from Afghan women and collected them as proof and documentation of these atrocities. Mani told Ms. Magazine: “Women activists in Afghanistan are fighting to convince [the] international community to recognise gender apartheid in Afghanistan. And Taliban should [be held] accountable for the crime they have done for Afghan women. They should pay.”
Female Role Model 13: Sandra Dominguez – Mexico
The late Sandra Domínguez was a feminist activist who fought against femicide in Mexico. She was renowned for assisting the families of missing women and for rocking the political establishment in Oaxaca by exposing and denouncing the powerful men involved in misogynistic WhatsApp groups. She studied law at university before going on to create the Liberal Union of Oaxacan Women for championing women’s rights in the region. She worked tirelessly for women’s empowerment, from encouraging women from Mixe communities, many of whom are poor and marginalised, to get into politics to rescuing domestic abuse victims. On 4 October 2024, Domínguez stopped answering her family’s calls and her husband also vanished. The uproar over their disappearance spurred investigations that uncovered their bodies 6 months later. A friend, who asked to remain anonymous for their safety, told The Guardian: “Sandra was a pioneer, a woman who stood up to men with machetes. […] She always said we had to be fearless.”
Female Role Model 14: Sylvia Yu Friedman – Canada
Sylvia Yu Friedman is a Korean Canadian ex-journalist, author, filmmaker and women’s human rights advocate who began her career by telling the story of Kim Soon-duk, a Korean survivor of Japanese military sexual slavery. While working as a freelance journalist in Beijing, she spent a decade interviewing 15 former comfort women who had been repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers each day during World War II. Friedman’s work with comfort women led to her investigation of the modern-day trafficking and enslavement of women and girls. She told Channel News Asia: “I began to see there was a cycle that was repeating – women’s voices are often ignored, silenced, whitewashed.” She took her investigations a step further by filming footage under dangerous circumstances in red-light districts to produce an award-winning three-part documentary series about human trafficking in China, Hong Kong, and Thailand.
Female Role Model 15: Yang Sophorn – Cambodia
For over two decades, Yang Sophorn has been a major force in Cambodia’s independent trade union movement where she has represented women workers. She has been a prominent voice in campaigning for holding international sports apparel brands which source from Cambodia, such as Nike and Adidas, responsible for labour violations in their overseas supply chains. She told Human Rights Watch: “Advocating against gender-based violence empowers all women to build up their self-confidence and make them feel powerful. In Cambodia, we have some [popular sayings] that demean and devalue women, making them feel worthless and unable to fight those in power. But as a union, we want to show our members and other workers that we have power. Our power comes through unity, and we believe that we can solve every issue when we come together. We can do it, we just need time, commitment, and patience.”
Female Role Model 16: Zhou Yao – China
Zhou Yao is Director of the Xinchen Marriage and Family Comprehensive Service Centre in Changsha City in Southern China. When the centre was established in 2014, she was just 20 years old. She began her work as an intern social worker and faced scepticism from survivors who deemed her too young to understand the complexities of domestic violence. To gain their trust, she focused on providing them with practical support including creating safety plans and helping them navigate the legal system. She told UN Women: “Once survivors saw tangible results, they began to believe in my ability to help them break free from their abusers and end the cycle of violence.” Since then, she has become a formidable force in the fight against domestic violence in Changsha City. Her organisation has assisted 300 survivors and conducted more than 5,000 consultations. In 2024, the centre also became a partner in UN Women China’s “Solidarity in Efforts for Ending Violence Against Women” programme, which helped establish China’s first court-based “One-Stop” Anti-Domestic Violence Service Centre.
Photo Credits:
- Bijaya Rai Shrestha –– From “Champions of Change: Activists Leading the Fight Against Gender-Based Violence at Work” (hrw.org/Bijaya Rai Shrestha)
- Branislava Arađan – From “In the words of Branislava Arađan: “Online harassment can hinder young women’s participation in public discussions and activism” (UN Women/Branislava Arađan)
- Bukky Shonibare – From “Global activist – now a U of T PhD student – uses AI to combat sexual violence” (University of Toronto/ Bukky Shonibare)
- Choi Mal-Ja – From “Woman who bit off attacker’s tongue acquitted after 61 years” (BBC)
- Fatou Baldeh – From Wikimedia Commons (U.S. Department of State from United States, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
- Gisele Pelicot – From Wikimedia Commons (TVA Nouvelles, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
- Irene Cari – From “Interview with Irene Cari: How indigenous and feminist women’s groups in Argentina are rising to stop racist sexual violence and femicide” (UN Women/Irene Cari)
- Jeaninne Niyoyankunze – From “Burundian refugee uses film to educate on violence against women in Rwanda” (UNHCR/Eric Didier Karinganire)
- Juliana Laguna Trujillo – From https://4genderjustice.org/
- Natalie Fleet – From Wikimedia Commons (©House of Commons, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
- Pallabi Ghosh – From pallabighoshidf (Instagram/Pallabi Ghosh)
- Sahra Mani – From https://vcfa.edu/visiting-faculty/sahra-mani/
- Sandra Dominguez – From “She stood up to men with machetes’: Sandra Domínguez fought against femicide in Mexico – then became a victim herself” (The Guardian/ Maria Alferez)
- Sylvia Yu Friedman – From “She risked her life to investigate human trafficking and the sex trade: ‘My life flashed before my eyes’ (Channel News Asia/Matt Friedman)
- Yang Sophorn – From “Champions of Change: Activists Leading the Fight Against Gender-Based Violence at Work” (hrw.org/Yang Sophorn)
- Zhou Yao – From “For ALL Women and Girls: Zhou Yao leads collective actions to end violence against women” (UN Women/Mengwen Chen)
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