Natasha Stott Despoja calls me from her place in Adelaide, South Australia.
Born and raised in South Australia, Despoja is currently living back in her home city working as the Commissioner at the state’s Royal Commission into Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence. It’s one of the many hats Natasha wears at the moment, particularly in light of her re-election to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) for 2025-2028 – which sees her in Geneva for around three months a year. She’s set for a busy 12 months, to say the least.
Natasha tells me that the next CEDAW session is coming up in October – which also coincides with International Day of the Girl. We both reflect on how even since last year, the rights of women and girls around the world continue to be wound back. It’s been devastating to watch. With the three-year anniversary of the fall of Kabul coming up, the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, I ask Natasha what is front of mind for her and the CEDAW team at the moment.
“Gosh, from the international perspective, I’m very concerned about not only countries that have been slow to advance the rights of women and girls, but those who are actively backtracking. So you mentioned Afghanistan and the three-year anniversary. It’s extraordinary to look at that country and essentially, it’s gender apartheid that’s now in place now,” she says.
“And thankfully there are academics and lawyers who are going to, I think through the international justice system, start to challenge that. But it’s still not making a difference to the lives of women and girls on the ground.”
She says it’s hard to isolate one country in particular, and highlights examples ranging from young women being poisoned for going to school in Iran, how close The Gambia got to legalising female genital mutilation, Iraq potentially legalising child marriage – to the backtracking of sexual and reproductive health rights in places like the United States.
Violence against women is very much at the forefront of her concerns. “It’s so impossible for women and girls to succeed in any way if they are experiencing violence or fear violence,” she says. “And so for me, the abuse, the coercion, the sexual violence, including in conflict at the moment, has to be a priority area for assessment.”
Natasha was the founding chair of Our Watch, and believes that the worst manifestations of gender inequality is violence against women and children. She says that a key component of her current role as Commissioner at the SA Royal Commission is getting to the bottom of why current frameworks and policies aren’t working. “There’s a lot of evidence, there’s a lot of research telling us what we can do and should do. In this inquiry, the focus is very sort of so -called forward -facing,” she says.
“It’s about discovering what’s not working and why, what’s not being implemented properly, where are the gaps in the system, who’s not talking to each other. So I think it’s a very practical outlook as well as one that relies heavily on the evidence base that’s available to tell us why this violence occurs in the first place.”
She’s determined that the Commission’s recommendations are implementable and actually make a difference. “But when you talk about the framework not working, it’s quite fascinating, isn’t it? Because we know that this, we know population wide change is possible. We’ve seen it in public health, we’ve seen it with tobacco, we’ve seen it with, you know, sunscreen and smoking. On seatbelt wearing, all of those primary prevention techniques. But unfortunately, violence against women has been around a lot longer than all of you know, those things. So it’s going to take generations to fix.”
So how does she stay optimistic, when so much of her role is fighting an uphill battle?
“It takes a lot of effort. I’m very fortunate that I meet extraordinary people, particularly extraordinary women and girls all the time. I’m particularly impressed by, you know, current younger female leaders. Everyone talks about youth being the future, but in fact there are so many relatively young people doing extraordinary work politically, policy-wise, activists,” she says.
“So I derive a lot of inspiration and guess optimism from seeing how the next generation is operating and what they will and won’t put up with. But I also know that we have seen extraordinary progress in various rights for women and girls over the last few decades and having those rights challenged is yes, very concerning, but we know that if we invest in women and girls that we will improve communities and societies.”