The Special Rapporteur on violence against women addressed the Commission on Human Rights earlier this month, warning against alarming trends toward political conservatism and a backlash which threatened the gains made thus far in the global women’s human rights agenda. Yakin Erturk, Special Rapporteur on violence against women, said she had emphasized the universality of violence against women, the multiplicity of its forms and the intersectionality of diverse kinds of discrimination against women rooted in other systems of subordination and inequality in her report to the Commission.