Düzen Tekkal & Kristina Lunz - Harbour Front Literaturfestival

For a society where everyone is safe

A call for a radical shift in thinking in politics and society.
The Collien Fernandes case has shaken Germany—and at the same time has ruthlessly exposed just how commonplace male violence against women is: digital and analog, physical, psychological, public, and private. It has also shown how inadequately the German legal system protects affected women and how wide the gap between outrage and political action still is.

Entrepreneurs, authors, and activists Kristina Lunz and Düzen Tekkal refuse to accept this. Together with politician Ricarda Lang, they launched the nationally acclaimed campaign “In Solidarity with Collien Fernandes,” supported by more than 250 women from politics, culture, media, business, and civil society. The resulting petition sets out ten concrete demands against male and digital violence—and mobilized hundreds of thousands of supporters in a very short time.

In their book *“Who Gave You Permission to Hate Women So Much?”*, Lunz and Tekkal demonstrate that violence against women is not a marginal issue, an isolated incident, or a private tragedy, but rather a structural problem. They highlight shortcomings in criminal law, failures in law enforcement, and the lack of a coherent, comprehensive government strategy against gender-based violence. At the same time, they ask what needs to change politically, legally, and socially so that protection no longer depends on chance.

It is an evening about anger and responsibility, about law and justice, about solidarity, and about the concrete demand on society—which must not resign itself to the fact that women experience violence and then often have to fight for credibility, protection, and consequences.

“A society in which there is de facto no justice for women who are subjected to male violence is not a society we can accept.”

Kristina Lunz is an entrepreneur, author, and human rights activist. She founded the Center for Feminist Foreign Policy and has worked for the United Nations, among other organizations, as well as a consultant for the German Foreign Office. Her books include *The Future of Foreign Policy Is Feminist* and *Empathy and Resistance*.

Düzen Tekkal, the daughter of a Yazidi-Kurdish refugee family, is a political scientist, social entrepreneur, journalist, and human rights activist. In 2015, she founded HÁWAR.help with her sisters, followed in 2019 by the educational initiative GermanDream. She is committed to combating extremism and promoting women’s rights, democracy, and an open society.