One Billion Rising: February 2013 Walk Out |Strike|Move|Dance
According to the web site for the project One Billion Rising,
“ONE IN THREE WOMEN ON THE PLANET WILL BE RAPED OR BEATEN IN HER LIFETIME.
ONE BILLION WOMEN VIOLATED IS AN ATROCITY.”
Eve Ensler, a celebrated Tony Award winning playwright, performer, and activist is the author of “The Vagina Monologues”, a show which ran Off-Broadway for five years and has toured all over the world.
It is the play, based on dozens of interviews Ensler conducted with women, in which matters of women’s sexuality and the social stigma surrounding rape and abuse, began to create a new conversation about and with women.
This conversation had begun in the 1970s when Ntozake Shange’s Obie Award winning experimental stage play/choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf” debuted in 1975 Off-Broadway and in 1976 on Broadway at the Booth Theater.
It began anew in 2009 with the release of Nicolas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s “Half the Sky”; the book is their passionate call to arms to end what they call “our era’s most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the developing world.” They tell the stories of women and girls throughout Asia and Africa struggling to survive sex slavery, devastating injuries in childbirth, as well as ceremonial genital mutilations along with other gender specific acts of abuse, humiliation and degradation; they are women, who in the end, find the key to economic progress when their potential is unleashed as they are brought into the formal economy.
It is clear gender abuse crimes are a global phenomenon.
Nearly fifteen years ago Ms Ensler and a group of women established V-Day with this simple mission:
They demand violence against women and girls must end.
To do this, once a year, in February, March, and April, Ms Ensler allows groups around the world to produce a performance of the play, as well as other works created by V-Day, and use the proceeds for local individual projects and programs that work toward ending violence against women and girls, often shelters and rape crisis centers. What began as one event in New York City in 1998 today includes over 5,800 V-Day events annually.
V-Day is the sponsor of the One Billion Rising world-wide event set for Thursday, February 14, 2013… remember that date!
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