In Brazil, violence against women is growing. In 2024, the country recorded the highest number of femicides in its history: 1,492 victims. In 79.6% of news coverage about these crimes, the media uses the passive voice, a structure that focuses on what happened to the victim rather than who committed the act. By writing “a woman was killed” instead of “a man kills a woman,” the aggressor disappears. As a result, crimes with perpetrators become sentences without subjects, and responsibility is diluted.
To address the problem at its root, UN Women created the Active Voice project, a movement to change how news is written. It starts with a simple idea: when the aggressor appears in the sentence, responsibility appears with him. By replacing passive voice with active voice, headlines stop hiding who committed the crime and start revealing who must be held accountable, turning language into a tool for accountability.
Idea: We brought together some of Brazil’s most influential journalists to take this change nationwide and, with a direct instruction, invited the media to rewrite their headlines. What started as an initiative quickly gained scale and became a collective movement, with professionals and experts spontaneously joining to expand the discussion. To impact the future as well, we brought the movement to Estácio, one of the country’s largest private universities, integrating the topic into the education of future journalists.
