Between November 25th and December 10th, CES is celebration 16 days of activism for the end of violence against women. This year's campaign theme is "Challenging militarism and ending violence against women"
 
The photo exhibition "Sex(ed) Pistols: 16 portraits on violence against women", promoted by the Observatory on Gender and Armed Violence (OGiVA/CES), which will be held at the Centre for Social Studies (UC), aims at revealing one of the faces of militarization of the lives of women and girls. All 16 photos document the insecurities affecting women and girls resulting from small arms and light weapons dissemination worldwide and, particularly in Portugal, Brazil, El Salvador, as well as the experiences of feminine anti-violence activism emerging on those contexts.
 
According to the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development, guns kill annually 400 thousand people. Only 25% of these deaths are registered in war or armed conflict settings, affecting mostly civilians. Firearms are also responsible for the death of 240 thousand people every year in peace contexts as a result of homicide, intentional killings and suicide. In these contexts the majority of guns are in civilian hands, surpassing those under the control of the State and security forces.
Despite the fact that women and girls do not constitute the majority of the (direct) victims of guns – worldwide 90% of the agents and victims of gun violence are male – are affected disproportionately in several ways.
 
Armed domestic violence or gendered war strategies (systematic sexual crimes, femicide, forced displacement) in war, post-war and even in formal peace contexts are some of the examples of the impacts of guns in the lives of women.

Photos by Beto Pego (Brazil), Hélio Gomes (Portugal), Rita Santos (Portugal), Sílvia Roque (El Salvador) and Stéphan Laurent (El Salvador).