In a corner of Bolivia, the future of a 15-year-old girl was decided in a room she was never invited into. Across the world’s institutions, from national courts to the United Nations, the people most affected by decisions are still the least likely to make them. Mona Sinha says that can change, and that the next UN Secretary-General has the chance to prove it.
When Brisa de Angulo was fifteen years old, she was repeatedly raped by an adult cousin in Bolivia. When she told her parents, they believed her and supported her decision to seek justice. She did what we tell women and girls to do when they experience violence: she reported the crime and turned to the legal system for protection.
What followed was years of humiliation and institutional failure. Brisa endured invasive examinations, repeated court proceedings and judicial decisions that compounded her trauma. Her attacker was acquitted twice and fled the country before a third trial could proceed. Only in 2023, more than twenty years after she first reported the abuse, was he convicted in absentia. A conviction, however, is not the same as justice delivered.
Brisa refused to give up. She became a lawyer and advocate, established Breeze of Hope, an organization supporting children in Bolivia, and worked with national and international partners, including Equality Now, to challenge the system that had failed her. In January 2023, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights delivered a landmark judgment holding Bolivia responsible for violating her rights and subjecting her to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
The Court ordered far-reaching reforms, including consent-based sexual violence laws, stronger protections for adolescent survivors, and changes to investigative and judicial practices. It established standards with implications well beyond Bolivia.
But the judgment was not the end of the struggle. Equality Now and our partners have since helped advance consent-based sexual violence reforms in Mexico, supported regional standards for investigating these crimes, and worked with advocates in Bolivia to translate the ruling into national law. That work has encountered organised resistance, including efforts to discredit survivors and undermine the reforms the Court ordered.
Brisa’s experience exposes a difficult truth about power: institutions may recognise injustice in principle while resisting the changes required to end it in practice.
Her story raises a question we should ask of every institution that claims to represent us: Who has a voice, who has a choice, and who gets to shape our lives?
Brisa was silenced for years by fear, threats and a justice system that repeatedly blamed and failed her. Yet she found the courage to speak out and fight for justice, transforming her own painful experience into a powerful movement for change. Working alongside others, including Equality Now, she challenged discriminatory laws, demanded accountability and helped create pathways to justice for other survivors.
We often overlook this distinction in conversations about equality. We celebrate women entering professions once closed to them, gaining access to institutions and taking their places at tables where decisions are made. All of this matters. I have spent much of my life working to open those doors, and I know how difficult it can be to walk through them.
But being invited into a room does not necessarily mean having the authority to influence what happens there. Women can be consulted without their recommendations being adopted, represented without their priorities being reflected in decisions, and celebrated without being given the resources to bring about change.
At Equality Now, we see the consequences every day. For more than three decades, we have worked with survivors, lawyers, activists and governments to change laws that discriminate against women and girls. Some deny women the right to work, inherit property or pass citizenship to their children. Others fail to protect girls from child marriage or allow perpetrators of sexual violence to escape accountability.
Our 2025 review, published thirty years after the Beijing Platform for Action, found that no country has achieved full legal equality. Yet more than half the discriminatory laws we have highlighted since 1999 have now been fully or partially amended or repealed.
That progress happened because women and their allies refused to accept injustice as inevitable. They documented harm, challenged governments, brought cases before courts and built coalitions, often despite threats and considerable personal risk.
In Sierra Leone and Colombia, sustained advocacy helped secure landmark reforms prohibiting child marriage. Across Eurasia, women’s rights organisations are challenging discriminatory sexual violence laws and demanding better access to justice, including for women and girls with disabilities.
And in Latin America, Brisa’s case continues to demonstrate how a single legal victory can become the foundation for broader change. In Oaxaca, Mexico, reforms adopted in 2025 introduced consent-based definitions of sexual offences. Across the region, prosecutors have adopted a model protocol incorporating survivor-centred standards. These developments reflect years of collaboration among survivors, feminist lawyers, civil society organisations and public institutions.
They also remind us that changing the law is only the beginning. Justice depends on whether institutions implement those changes and whether women and girls can exercise their rights in practice.
Research reinforces this experience. A landmark study of violence-against-women legislation across seventy countries found that strong, autonomous feminist movements were among the most consistent drivers of government action. Women’s representation in parliament, national wealth and the political party in power did not explain reform as consistently as the presence of organised women demanding change.
The evidence is equally compelling when we consider peace and security. Research has found that women’s meaningful influence in peace negotiations can strengthen the prospects for lasting agreements. Yet according to UN reporting, women accounted for just seven per cent of negotiators on average in major peace processes in 2024. Only 31 per cent of the agreements reached that year included provisions addressing women, girls, gender or sexual violence.
We have spent decades acknowledging women’s indispensable role in building peace while continuing to exclude them from many of the decisions that determine whether peace will endure.
This is not simply unfair. It is poor governance.
Women are not a special-interest group in discussions about security. They experience conflict, displacement, sexual violence and economic insecurity. They organise humanitarian responses, document abuses and negotiate solutions within their communities. Their experiences are central to understanding what security means and what lasting peace requires.
The United Nations recognised this principle in Security Council Resolution 1325 more than twenty-five years ago. The Beijing Platform for Action made the case for women’s equal participation in decision-making even earlier. We have made commitments, adopted resolutions and created mechanisms. Yet the distance between those promises and women’s lived experiences remains enormous.
I see that distance every year at the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Thousands of advocates gather in New York, bringing evidence, legal expertise and practical solutions developed through decades of work. Their contributions enrich the discussions, but when governments negotiate the final language, much of that expertise remains outside the room.
Have we allowed consultation to become a substitute for sharing power?
This matters particularly for women from the Global Majority. Too often, those living with the consequences of international decisions have the least influence over how they are made. Their organisations provide research, testimony and local knowledge, while institutions elsewhere determine priorities, budgets and measures of success.
We cannot continue treating women leading change in their communities as sources of information rather than partners in making decisions.
The next United Nations Secretary-General has an opportunity to address this imbalance. I have signed Global 50/50’s open letter because I believe the UN must demonstrate what meaningful participation looks like in practice.
Women’s rights organisations, particularly those from the Global Majority, must have genuine influence over mandates, resources, programmes and leadership. Activists who speak out must be protected from reprisals. Most of all, organisations doing this work need sustained funding, not simply invitations to another consultation.
Above all, institutions must be willing to share authority.
Having worked in finance, business, philanthropy and human rights, I have seen how readily institutions concentrate power and how reluctant they can be to relinquish it. I have also seen what happens when people use their influence to create opportunities for others.
I have often said that power shared is power supercharged. Brisa’s case demonstrates what that means. Her determination, her family’s support, the expertise of local and international lawyers, the strength of feminist coalitions and the commitment of long-term partners combined to achieve something none could have accomplished alone. Sharing power did not diminish anyone’s contribution. It multiplied their collective impact.
Brisa should never have needed to spend decades fighting for a justice system to recognise her rights. Nor should women have to demonstrate extraordinary courage simply to claim protections and opportunities that should already be theirs.
Our responsibility is to change the conditions that make such courage necessary.
As the UN prepares for its next chapter of leadership, we should measure progress differently. Not only how many women were invited to participate, but whose recommendations were adopted, who helped set the agenda, who controlled the resources and whether the decisions improved people’s lives.
A right recognised but not enforced is a promise unfulfilled. A voice heard but denied influence is participation without power.
The true measure of equality is not simply whether women are present. It is whether they have the power to shape what happens next.
Mona Sinha is Chief Executive Officer of Equality Now, 2026 inductee into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and Forbes 50 over 50: Impact leader. She is a signatory to the Global 50/50 open letter to the next UN Secretary-General.
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