This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Reem Alsalem, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, is unlikely to convince the Taliban to allow girls to go to school. Nor will she end honour killings, domestic abuse or the sex industry. But she is determined to use her six years in the unpaid but demanding post to give it a damn good try.
“For me, this role is not just about producing reports on safe topics. And if the Human Rights Council wanted academic papers, they could commission them from scholars,” she says. Rather, her role is to consider complex issues, highlight overlooked challenges and analyse them from a human rights perspective. “I do not claim I hold the absolute truth, but to approach issues independently and impartially as I am bound by the code of conduct I signed as a rapporteur — and to always remain focused on their impact on women and girls.”
The former international civil servant joined the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees at the age of 23 and spent 17 years in more than 13 countries, including conflict zones and areas ravaged by natural disasters. “Women fleeing persecution and war, forced to become refugees or stranded at borders; they face trafficking, sexual exploitation, violence and social exclusion. I have witnessed first-hand the brutal discrimination and violence inflicted on women and girls — there is no doubt they experience all this in a specific way because they are female.”
Being an advocate for the four billion females across the world is an ambitious brief. But whilst the UN special rapporteur is appointed by the UN Human Rights Council and the UN High Commissioner’s office provides secretarial support, the role is not on the UN staff or payroll, nor does she report to any UN official, not even the High Commissioner.
What prompted Alsalem to apply and then dedicate herself full-time to her mandate is the opportunity to keep women’s issues at the forefront of decision-making. Whilst she is keen to keep our interview wide-ranging, there is one issue in particular that has seen her both praised and vilified, and it can’t be avoided: the erasure of sex-specific language and the denial of sex itself pose a major yet overlooked threat to women’s rights.
“Perhaps because I circulated amongst humanitarians rather than the gender or women’s rights crowd, I was not aware of these kinds of emerging issues,” she concedes. “If someone had told me five years ago that I would be called ‘hateful’ for acknowledging that sex is a biological reality, I would have told them they were lying. Now we are in a position where women, and their male allies, are losing jobs, being vilified and attacked for saying something as basic as sex is immutable and real.”
“To put it in perspective,” she continues, “imagine telling black people that their experiences of discrimination based on their race are irrelevant and that anyone can identify as black and claim the same experiences and entitlements as someone who has lived their whole life as a black person. We would not equate between someone who is black and someone who identifies as black. This would be unacceptable to anyone, and I believe the same principle applies to women and girls.”
To this end Alsalem has authored reports and written to governments across the world, including Scotland and Germany, to warn of the unintended consequences of gender self-identification laws. Whilst she accepts the rights of gender identity acquisition laws to exist, she is concerned about the general lack of safeguards and the disregard that self-ID laws have for single sex spaces, women and children.
She is particularly proud of her 2024 report on violence against women and girls in sport, which she began to write following her intervention on the Biden administration’s decision to axe Title IX which protected the female category in sport.
She identified 890 instances where male athletes won in female-only sporting categories
The document, the first of its kind, detailed the different forms of violence that women and girls face in sport, including infringements on the female category. She identified 890 instances where male athletes competed in and won female-only sporting categories. Since the report was published some major sporting associations have revised their policies, and Reem now hopes the International Olympic Committee will take heed.
Predictably, her focus on contentious issues has not been universally popular, and she has faced coordinated attacks from opponents within the human rights sector. Earlier this year, 200 NGOs signed a letter denouncing her for focusing on sex-based discrimination in an upcoming report, arguing her approach marginalised “vulnerable groups, including trans and gender-diverse persons”. Alsalem was accused of having a “Western colonial patriarchal worldview” that “undermines decades of progress”. She finds the accusation ludicrous.
Yet she remains pragmatic about the harassment she has faced and thankful for the support she has received from women’s groups across the world. A counter letter defending her work gained backing from 514 organisations. Still, she acknowledges, “The elephant in the room is that feminists themselves are bitterly divided.”
“I am not here necessarily to be liked, and many things we say do not appeal to everyone. These are complex, often polarising issues, with powerful interest groups and lobbies involved,” she admits. “I’ve had invitations withdrawn and been disinvited from events because of positions I have taken, which I find unfortunate. Attempts by some to name and shame me have only increased over the years but so has the support. I am aware that the push-back would not be as strong if my work did not have an impact. Governments and civil society organisations, academic institutions and courts have engaged with my reports and recommendations. That is what any rapporteur would want — for their work to be timely, relevant and useful whilst considering policies and practices.”
NGOs triggered by her sex-based approach are equally outraged by her stance on prostitution. Her 2024 report on violence against women and girls in prostitution pulled no punches. She debunked the “happy hooker” myth, laid bare the links between pornography and the normalisation of sexual violence and called on member states to do their duty: criminalise the buyers, not the women trapped in the trade.
This unflinching analysis made the NGO staff who proudly claim “sex work is work” squirm. “When I reflect on the factors affecting women’s ability to enjoy their rights, one of the biggest problems is the commodification and commercialisation of everything to do with women themselves — their bodies, reproductive capacity — everything. It is deeply troubling, dehumanises women, and normalises paedophilia, turning us into objects that can be bought and sold.”
She thinks that those on the other side have been clever. They’ve repackaged subjugation of women, and some have bought it. They’ve said that prostitution is empowering and that it’s about bodily autonomy and consent, and that regulating it will decrease any risks involved. “Today, you can just click on a button and buy a woman or buy an image of her. Now, you can also buy her baby. Prostitution has been sanitised, rebranded as glamorous and sold to girls by OnlyFans ambassadors as a normal way to make lots of money.
“I actually think men are also exploited by pornography,” she continues. “They become addicts, and their attention and sexual lives have become commodified. It destroys their views of the other half of society. It destroys their relationship with women and children. We know it leads to physical aggression and violence in the physical world. They develop sexual dysfunctions. We need to talk about that too. Men need to talk to each other about it. You know men are victims of this capitalist, exploitative, greedy model of making money, too.”
She is frustrated by the silence of the international community to speak up for those suffering as a result of male violence. “Tell me, who else is speaking out about the use of sexual violence in DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo] right now? Once 10,000 Palestinian women have been killed in Gaza and no meaningful action is taken by the international community to stop it, it sets a dangerous and potentially irreversible blow to international law and the protections it provides during times of war. It signals that such crimes can happen again, with no consequences, and it will only get worse. People will stop even talking about it.”
Alsalem has also been outspoken in her criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza. She has claimed that reproductive health services and pregnant and nursing women have been deliberately targeted as part of a systematic genocide strategy.
Bemoaning the blocking veto-powers on The Security Council which halt efforts to stop aggression and the waning authority of the Geneva Conventions, the UNHCR and the International Committee of the Red Cross to operate with some level of safety, Alsalem also believes that “we wouldn’t witness the normalisation of such widespread violence and killing of children if the world hadn’t already normalised the same in countries that are supposedly at peace. We no longer see children as children.”
It’s easy to poke fun at the global bureaucrats who hand down edicts like medieval popes. But the unifying vision and hope on which the UN was founded still resonates even at a time of widespread cynicism and entrenched political divides. Reem Alsalem is an idealist — but one who refuses to look away from the hardest realities. Whether the world will listen is another question.
