It would be easy to say that, so far, 2017 hasn’t been a great year for women around the world. With the new President often making sexist comments, wanting to shut down Planned Parenthood, make abortions illegal etc, we thought we’d seen a bad hit. We came back with marches around the world. Later Russia were happy to decriminalise domestic abuse in the first instance, another hard pill to swallow for women. Every day we hear more and more stories in the news of girls being the victims of honour killings, acid attacks and the like. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, scared and confused about how things have gone so, so wrong when it’s only February.

Of course, we’ve also seen women and men speaking out against such injustices. Speak out against the governments letting women down and continuing to do so. I worried, when writing this blog that I was talking about the USA again. I feel like I think and write about it a lot, this isn’t because the UK doesn’t have it’s problems, it’s not because I don’t care about women who have it worse, it’s because I need to process what’s happening in what is supposedly one of the most forward thinking nations on the planet.

In these times of darkness, uncertainty and, quite frankly, madness, we need to be there for each other. We need to remember what has come before, that we prevailed. Now that we have social media we can show our support to causes all over the world, let our sisters know they are not alone, that we are thinking and campaigning alongside them. We don’t know what is going to happen, I wish I could say this is all a nightmare that will be over soon, but it might not.

All we have in this fight is each other, fighting amongst ourselves is what they want. Instead of tearing each other down or judging one another we need to lift each other up. We need to let men be our allies if they are willing to stand and fight with us for equality and against the government (hating all men won’t get us any further, it just won’t).

We will stand with our sisters in 2017 and beyond.