November 25 is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and December 10 is International Human Rights Day. In 1991, the Center for Women's Global Leadership declared the 16 days between the two events "16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence." The campaign seeks to link violence against women – long seen as a "private matter" – to the public, global struggle for human rights.

A quick review of international news in the past month confirms what the world already knows – violence against women knows no borders, and despite progress made in the past few decades, there is still a "massive culture of neglect and denial" surrounding the issue. We know that violence against women takes many forms-from femicides in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, to hate crimes committed against women and girls in the United States, to street harassment in Egypt, to rape used as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We know it's everywhere, but we also know that conflict, stress, and poverty make it worse.

For example, a recent Human Rights Watch report on violence against women in Palestine highlights two disturbing trends: first, since the political violence in Palestine took a sharp upward turn in 2000, intimate partner violence, rape, incest, child abuse, and so-called "honor crimes" have been on the rise. Second, during the same period, the prevalence of support structures for female victims of violence has declined substantially. In another phenomenon I would classify as violence against women, Women's ENews recently reported that Palestinian women urgently seeking emergency obstetric care are experiencing life-threatening delays at military checkpoints. The Palestinian Health Information Center reports that between September 2000 and August 2006, 10 percent of women in labor were delayed for between 2 and 4 hours, resulting in 68 women being forced to give birth at the checkpoints themselves. The situation has precipitated the deaths of at least 4 pregnant women and at least 34 newborns in the past 6 years alone. As if it's not bad enough just to be pregnant in the Palestinian territories, where food and water shortages, malnutrition, disease, and poverty make healthy pregnancies few and far between.

The situation in Palestine is extreme, but the official reaction to violence against women should be pretty familiar by now. As Lucy Mair, co-researcher and co-author of the Human Rights Watch report, points out, "When confronted with cases of violence against women and girls, the Palestinian criminal justice system is more interested in avoiding public scandal than in seeing justice done." Just like women demonstrating against street violence in Cairo have been accused of "degrading Egypt's reputation," and just like Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Brett Myers's June decision to beat his wife up in the middle of the street was called an "off-field incident" in "the player's private life" by Major League Baseball spokesman Mike Teevan.

Reacting to violence against women in this way, rather than seeing it as part of a larger continuum of human rights violations, hampers our ability to address the problem effectively. To find out how you can get involved in 16 Days of Activism, click here.