2026 Shortlist
We’re delighted to announce the shortlist of feminist campaigners for the 2026 Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize. This year we received more than 50 nominations, with many outstanding candidates. Read more about this year’s shortlisted nominees below.
Please note: The summaries below are drawn from the women's nomination forms and reflect the words of the people who nominated them.
Adama Nyama Bah
Adama is a survivor, nurse colposcopist and founder of the Women’s Health Advocacy Network (WHAN), a London-based charity supporting women and girls affected by sexual violence and harmful practices, including female genital mutilation (FGM).
Born in Sierra Leone, Adama survived FGM as a child and repeated sexual violence during the country’s civil war. After rebuilding her life in the UK, she became an outspoken advocate for women whose experiences of abuse are too often met with silence, stigma or inadequate support. Through her writing, media interviews and work with WHAN, she campaigns for greater awareness, culturally appropriate services and the right of every woman to be heard and treated with dignity.
Catrin Nye
Catrin is an investigative journalist and the co-writer, co-producer and presenter of the phenomenally successful BBC podcast ‘Swingers’ which shed light on coerced swinging and the appalling police response to reported abuse by victims.
The podcast has been extremely popular and has led to dozens of women coming forward to describe their experience and the lack of help they have received from the criminal justice system.
The issue has been followed up in reporting in the media including the BBC, The Observer, Woman's Hour and the Times. It has also resulted in the issue being raised with Satvir Khan MP, Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls by Sir Alec Shelbrooke MP. None of this would be happening without Catrin’s podcast.
Aneeta Prem MBE
Aneeta has spent more than fifteen years campaigning against forced marriage, female genital mutilation and other abuse affecting women and girls. She co-founded Freedom Charity in 2009 and has used campaigning, writing, education and practical safeguarding to make subjects that were often hidden easier to recognise and discuss.
She has given evidence to Parliament on forced marriage, written books for young people about forced marriage and female genital mutilation, worked with schools and professionals, and helped people at risk find support. Her work is firm about abuse without blaming whole cultures or communities. She has continued this work long after individual cases have disappeared from the headlines.
Charlotte Schreurs
Charlotte is a women's rights campaigner and founder of Open Justice For All, a survivor-led campaign challenging the barriers that prevent victims from accessing information about their own criminal cases.
Drawing on her experience of the justice system following rape and coercive control, Charlotte has transformed personal injustice into a determined campaign for transparency, accountability and meaningful reform.
Her advocacy has already helped secure a significant legislative change, giving victims of all crimes the right to access sentencing remarks free of charge. Through her commitment to collective action and ensuring victims' voices influence the decisions that affect them, Charlotte is helping to make open justice a right rather than a privilege.
Bryony Lawton
Bryony is the founder of Children Shouldn't Be Time-Barred, a grassroots campaign she started after her family's experience of the criminal justice system. After discovering that a statutory prosecution time limit could prevent a case involving her daughter from proceeding, Bryony began campaigning to raise awareness of the issue and to call for prosecution time limits affecting child victims to be reviewed.
She submitted Freedom of Information requests across all 43 police forces in England and Wales in an attempt to better understand how often investigations involving victims under 16 may have been affected by statutory prosecution time limits. What began with one family's experience has grown into a wider campaign seeking to understand how other children and families may also have been affected.
Della Wright
Della has diligently, persistently and with great dedication and determination, courageously shared her story to influence a change in the law via “Della's Law", to ensure future generations are better safeguarded and protected.
Della alongside the Safeguarding Alliance has campaigned for 8+ years to have the law changed. Since the early 2000's it has been known by successive UK Governments that convicted sex offenders have used a legal loophole that allows them to change their names by deed poll and erase their offending pasts. Della is a child sexual abuse survivor who has bravely chosen to speak out to share her story and bring about this vital change in law, to increase safeguarding.
FiLiA Hague Mothers (Ruth Dineen)
Ruth founded FiLiA Hague Mothers in 2022. It is a voluntary, women-led international campaign working to ensure that mothers escaping domestic abuse with their children are not punished for seeking safety.
Its work addresses a profoundly troubling injustice: the 1980 Hague Abduction Convention, an international treaty intended to secure the prompt return of children wrongfully removed across borders, which is used against protective mothers fleeing domestic abuse.
Javina Greene
Having navigated and overcome the harrowing realities of domestic abuse, sexual violence, addiction, and the isolation that often follows, Javina experienced first-hand the gaps where institutional support falls short. To address the severe lack of post-crisis support, Javina founded The Journey After Me, which evolved into R.U.N (Our Space) — a groundbreaking, post-crisis framework operating across Worcestershire.
Jhiselle Feanny
Since her younger sister Bianca ('Bee') tragically fell to her death from her ex-boyfriend's balcony in 2018, Jhiselle has fought tirelessly for bereaved families like hers - to have a voice in policy-making about domestic abuse. Alongside Julie Devey and Carole Gould, she founded the campaign group Killed Women in 2022, a campaigning organisation led by and representing the families of victims of fatal male violence.
In the four years since then she has been instrumental in researching, developing and raising the profile of Killed Women's campaigns, including its Fallen Women and Bee's Law campaigns, which were informed and motivated by her family's own fight for justice after Bianca's fatal fall. In addition to these national campaigns, Jhiselle is also supporting her family's continuing efforts to hold West Midlands Police accountable for its inadequate investigation into Bianca's death, including by acting as Litigation Friend for one of Bee's daughters who is bringing a claim against the police.
Kirsty Pellant
Kirsty is a passionate campaigner and advocate for victims of stalking, violence against women and digitally enabled abuse.
Following her own experience of prolonged stalking and sexualised online impersonation, which featured in ITV’s documentary Faked: Hunting My Online Predator, Kirsty has worked tirelessly to raise awareness of the devastating impact of these crimes. She is now campaigning for reputational abuse to be recognised as a distinct form of abuse in law, challenging gaps in legislation, victim support and the criminal justice system.
Through national media appearances, her parliamentary petition and engagement with policing and policymakers, Kirsty is determined to turn her own experience into meaningful change, ensuring that other victims are heard, protected and better supported.
Ruth O’Grady
Ruth worked with journalist Catrin Nye on the hard hitting BBC Podcast ‘Swingers’ which exposed how dozens of women were systemically coerced in sexual encounters with strangers via the UK’s largest swinging website ‘FabSwingers’.
Ruth waived her anonymity to raise awareness of how the UK swinging scene is being used by male partners to facilitate the rape and sexual assault of women, and of how women who report that abuse are subsequently failed by police due to a lack of understanding of coercive and controlling behaviour.
Venus-Astrid Lamey
Venus-Astrid is a survivor of sexual violence who has turned her lived experience into a powerful force for change. She has had to face the justice system twice and face her two perpetrators.
Through her campaign, #ShiftTheShame / #SymudYCywilydd, she challenges victim-blaming and promotes the message that shame, guilt and embarrassment belong to perpetrators, never survivors.
By sharing her story, raising awareness and challenging the stigma surrounding sexual violence, Venus has helped create space for other survivors to feel heard, believed and empowered. Venus-Astrid has raised £3,500 for RASASC North Wales, to say thank you for supporting her. Venus’s courage, determination and commitment to challenging injustice make her a powerful advocate for survivors of violence against women.