We ask consent for everything in our daily life, so why can’t we do it for sex?

With Amnesty International Switzerland, I worked on a nation-wide campaign from 2019 – 2022 with the aim to change the violence-based rape law which is violating international human rights standards into a modern rape law which is consent-based and in line with the Istanbul Convention on violence against women and domestic violence.

In a participative approach with the Design Thinking Method, we brought together different stakeholders, from sexual violence survivors, to politicians, feminist grassroot movements and Amnesty International campaigners, and we created collaboratively a campaign with the aim to advocate for the change of the rape law in order to allow justice for survivors of sexual violence.

Some of the milestones of the campaign:

We created an activist group with survivors of sexual violence meeting dozens of politicans.

In collaboration with the filmmaker Barbara Miller, provocative videos were produced and spread nation wide.

In collaboration with the research institute gfs.bern we conducted the first nation wide study on sexual violence in Switzerland.

In collaboration with messieurs.ch we created a campaign which shows the engagement of men in the fight against sexual violence.

In collaboration with Sexual Health Switzerland we created a Youth Task Force with young activists and conducted public advocacy actions (such as open mics of sexual violence survivors).

I was part of this all, as a women’s rights expert for Amnesty International Switzerland and later as the Campaign Coordinator. It was one of the most striking projects in my professional career leading me to use participative approaches in all future projects being convinced that this is the only way to go in campaigning and project management.

The parliament (Nationalrat) decided in early december that they want the “yes means yes” approach in the rape law. This is a huge success and the campaign of Amnesty International brought this issue to the table and spiked feminist mouvements to fight for this law change from 2019 until now.