At the 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70) in New York, feminist advocates, practitioners, researchers, and policymakers gathered to reflect on progress and persistent gaps in advancing gender equality. During a parallel event focused on gender-based violence (GBV), criminalisation, and access to justice, I shared COFEM’s reflections grounded in the experiences of over 400 feminist practitioners, researchers, and activists working globally to end violence against women and girls (VAWG).
What emerged clearly from both the discussion and our collective experience is this: justice is widely framed as a right, yet in practice it remains deeply unequal, costly, and often inaccessible to those who need it most.
These reflections are primarily grounded in contexts where formal legal and justice systems exist and are at least partially functioning, even if unevenly resourced or accessible. While these systems vary significantly across regions, the discussion here focuses on how justice operates within established legal frameworks and the lived realities of survivors navigating them.
In humanitarian settings, conflict-affected contexts, or situations of state collapse, the dynamics of access to justice are often fundamentally different, requiring distinct legal, protection, and accountability approaches. This distinction is important, as the political and institutional conditions shaping justice systems significantly influence what “access” and “accountability” can mean in practice.
Justice Is a Right, But It Is Not Free
In policy spaces, justice is often discussed in legal and institutional terms, such as courts, laws, and prosecutions. Yet for survivors of GBV, accessing justice is rarely straightforward. It is slow, extractive, emotionally draining, and financially costly.
Survivors in many contexts spend years navigating court systems. Many pay out of pocket for legal fees, transport to hearings, medical certificates, and documentation. Time spent attending court hearings often means lost wages, childcare challenges, and increased exposure to stigma or backlash. In many cases, these barriers become so overwhelming that survivors withdraw from the process entirely.
This raises critical questions: if justice is a right, why does access depend so heavily on a survivor’s financial, social, and emotional resources? And who ultimately benefits from systems that remain difficult to navigate?
Justice as a Shrinking Public Good
Across many contexts, justice systems are increasingly shaped by market-driven approaches. Essential services within justice processes, including legal representation, detention infrastructure, and medical examinations, are often privatised or underfunded. This creates a system where profit-driven actors benefit from punitive structures, while survivors struggle to access even basic support.
In practice, access to justice also depends on financial, geographic, and institutional resources, with survivors bearing costs related to documentation, transport, legal support, and repeated engagement with court processes. While punitive systems can and do deliver accountability in some cases, particularly where survivors seek formal prosecution, these outcomes are uneven and often inaccessible without significant resources and sustained support. As a result, survivors are often left navigating fragmented and uneven systems, where access to support and accountability is shaped as much by structural inequality as by formal legal entitlements.
At the same time, legal aid systems remain chronically under-resourced. In this gap, feminist organisations and grassroots groups step in to fill critical functions. They:
- Accompany survivors to court,
- Translate complex legal language,
- Document cases,
- Monitor police and judicial processes,
- Provide psychosocial support, and
- Challenge discriminatory practices.
These roles are essential for justice to function at all, yet they are rarely recognised or adequately funded.
The consequences are uneven. From an intersectionality perspective, survivors who are racialised, disabled, LGBTQ+, migrant, Indigenous, or living in rural or remote areas face compounded barriers that formal justice systems were never designed to address. These intersecting forms of marginalisation significantly shape how survivors experience and navigate justice processes, often making access extremely difficult or, in some cases, virtually impossible. For them, the cost of justice is not only financial; it is structural, shaped by multiple and reinforcing layers of inequality.
The Invisible Cost of Feminist Legal Support to Survivors
Justice systems do not operate in isolation; they are sustained by human labour, much of it invisible and gendered.
Feminist advocates, paralegals, counsellors, and community organisers provide the care and accompaniment that make justice processes survivable. They respond to crisis calls at all hours, mediate with families and authorities, translate legal jargon, and provide emotional support before, during, and after court proceedings.
This labour is frequently underpaid or unpaid. It is carried out alongside domestic responsibilities, in contexts of shrinking civic space, and often under significant personal and security risks.
The result is a system where those working to uphold survivors’ rights absorb emotional trauma, burnout, and financial instability in order to keep justice processes functioning. In effect, justice is subsidised by the unpaid and underrecognized labour of feminist movements.
Does Criminalisation Deliver Justice?
Criminalisation is often presented as the primary pathway to justice in cases of GBV. New laws and harsher penalties are introduced with promises of deterrence and accountability. However, from the perspective of many feminist practitioners, criminalisation alone does not guarantee justice and can sometimes create additional barriers.
Legal processes are often retraumatising, adversarial, and slow. Survivors may be repeatedly questioned, subjected to invasive examinations, and exposed to public scrutiny. Even where laws exist on paper, enforcement gaps, corruption, and discrimination frequently undermine outcomes.
Moreover, punitive approaches rarely address the structural drivers of violence: poverty, inequality, harmful gender norms, and weak social protection systems.
When states prioritise criminalisation while cutting funding to prevention and survivor support services, justice systems become more coercive without becoming more accessible. Even in cases where a court ruling results in legal accountability or conviction, this does not necessarily translate into healing or recovery for survivors, as the experience of violence often requires longer-term psychosocial, social, and material support beyond formal legal outcomes.
At the same time, feminist perspectives on criminalisation are not uniform. In many contexts, particularly where legal protections remain weak or absent, feminist movements continue to push for stronger GBV laws as essential steps toward accountability and state responsibility. In other contexts, particularly where legal frameworks are more established, there is growing critique of over-reliance on punitive systems that may reproduce harm or fail to meet survivors’ needs.
These tensions reflect uneven global progress and differing priorities shaped by context. Taken together, they point to a shared concern: legal reform alone is insufficient without sustained investment in implementation, survivor support, and the broader ecosystem required to make justice meaningful in practice.
When States Retreat, Movements Step In
In many contexts, shrinking civic space, authoritarian trends, and attacks on women human rights defenders further erode access to justice. Budget cuts and restrictive regulations weaken survivor services and limit legal redress pathways.
As state accountability diminishes, feminist organisations often expand their roles, running shelters, providing legal counselling, documenting abuses, and advocating for survivors at national and international levels.
While this demonstrates the resilience and creativity of feminist movements, it also exposes a structural reality: justice systems are increasingly dependent on under-resourced actors to function at all.
Reimagining Justice Beyond Punishment
Across the world, feminist movements are already developing alternative approaches to justice that centre healing, dignity, and survivor agency. These include community accountability processes, restorative justice practices, survivor-led support networks, solidarity funds to cover the costs of seeking justice, and community-based safe spaces for healing and collective support.
In some contexts, legal cooperatives and paralegal networks provide free or low-cost legal assistance. In others, community-based approaches prioritise dialogue, repair, and prevention rather than punishment alone.
These models do not reject accountability. Instead, they expand it towards approaches that prioritise transformation, safety, and collective wellbeing.
Financing Justice as Care Infrastructure
A feminist lens reframes justice not only as a legal process but as part of a broader care infrastructure. Survivors need safe housing, healthcare, psychosocial support, and economic stability to pursue justice meaningfully. Without these foundations, legal rights remain largely theoretical.
This shifts the focus from whether laws exist on paper to whether systems are adequately resourced and accessible in practice, and for whom. It also highlights the need to fund the organisations and networks that provide day-to-day support – the ones that make justice exist in practice.
Towards Collective Responsibility and Public Investment
If justice is to function as a genuine public good, it must be financed as one. This requires sustained public investment in legal aid, survivor services, and community-based support systems, as well as safeguards and accountability mechanisms to ensure that justice systems are not shaped by profit extraction.
It also means recognising feminist movements not as temporary service providers, but as essential infrastructure within justice ecosystems. Their work in prevention, accompaniment, legal reform, and community education is foundational, yet persistently underfunded.
A Question for the Global Community
As global policy spaces continue to debate criminal law as the primary response to GBV, we must ask deeper questions about how justice systems are financed and who bears their costs. Justice should not depend on a survivor’s ability to pay, fundraise, or endure prolonged hardship. Nor should it rely on the unpaid labour of activists to remain operational.
At CSW70, the conversations made clear that feminist movements are already demonstrating what more holistic, survivor-centred justice can look like. The question now is whether states and institutions are willing to invest in these approaches and redistribute resources accordingly.
Ultimately, the question is not only whether justice exists in law, but whether it exists in practice, and for whom.
If we are serious about ending violence against women and girls, we must ensure that justice systems are inclusive, intersectional, publicly funded, and grounded in care rather than profit. Only then can justice move from an abstract right to a lived reality for survivors everywhere.
These reflections were shared during the CSW70 parallel event “GBV, Criminalisation and Access to Justice,” held in New York in March 2026. By Pupul Lama
