Inner Wheel Club of Omagh launches awareness drive on Violence Against Women

THE Inner Wheel Club of Omagh has stepped up efforts to highlight what it describes as one of the most urgent global crises of our time - violence against women and girls.

Speaking at the club’s monthly meetingi n the Silverbirch Hotel, Omagh last Thursday night, which was expanded into a public conference, secretary Cathy McCaul outlined both the scale of the issue and the club’s plans to take action.

“We intend to use the power of our membership to help raise awareness about one of the biggest global crises of our time, violence against women and girls,” McCaul said.

She noted that one in three women globally will experience violence in their lifetime, and that a woman is killed every ten minutes by an intimate partner or family member. Locally, the figures are just as stark: the PSNI receives a domestic abuse call every 15 minutes, and 28 women have been murdered in Northern Ireland since 2020, 21 of them in their own homes.

“These statistics just highlight that domestic violence is a pervasive global issue, resulting in severe physical and mental health issues for survivors,” McCaul added. “We know that most perpetrators are men, but most men are not perpetrators, so it’s critical we have men and boys as key advocates against violence.”

The conference also served to introduce Inner Wheel’s global campaign, “Unite in Action: Her Safety Our Priority,” which supports the UN Women initiative Orange the World. The campaign aims to raise visibility around violence against women and girls and mobilise communities in response.

McCaul explained that the club’s key call to action is a community walk planned for November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

“In preparing for this walk, the Inner Wheel Club of Omagh decided we should truly understand the scale of the crisis, so we set up this conference as an educational forum,” she said. “We then decided to open it out to our community.”

The club hopes the event and the upcoming walk will spark wider engagement across Omagh and encourage collective action to tackle domestic and gender-based violence.