V-Day Stage Two Announced: One Billion Rising for Justice

Details

One Billion Rising Campaign Deepens and Expands with Focus on Justice

International Activist and Actor Monique Wilson Named One Billion Rising Director

New Short Film & Website Unveiled

8 July 2013 - Today, V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls, and the One Billion Rising campaign announced the launch of ONE BILLION RISING FOR JUSTICE. The campaign will build upon the energy and momentum that was created in 2013 when one billion activists in 207 countries came together to strike, dance, and rise to end violence against women and girls. This year, we will focus on the issue of justice for all survivors of gender violence, and ending the rampant impunity that prevails globally.

ONE BILLION RISING FOR JUSTICE is a call to women, men, and youth around the world to gather safely on 14 February 2014 outside places where they are entitled to justice – court houses, police stations, government offices, school administration buildings, work places, sites of environmental injustice, military courts, embassies, places of worship, homes, or simply public gathering places where women deserve to feel safe but too often do not.

The campaign is a recognition that we cannot end violence against women without looking at the intersection of poverty, racism, war, the plunder of the environment, capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy. Impunity lives at the heart of these interlocking forces.

“Many of our supporters wrote to tell us that this year they wanted to go further, to go deeper, to address impunity and the lack of accountability as significant factors in the perpetuation of violence against women. ONE BILLION RISING FOR JUSTICE is a call to survivors and their allies to break the silence – politically, outrageously, artistically – through art, dance, marches, ritual, song, spoken word, testimonies, and other ways that best express their outrage, their need, their desire, and their joy,” stated Eve Ensler, founder of V-Day and One Billion Rising. ”With this launch, I am thrilled to announce that Monique Wilson – an extraordinary V-Day activist for 15 years who literally inspired all 7,000 islands in the Philippines to rise and dance – is joining us as Director of the One Billion Rising campaign.”

“Our stories have been buried, denied, erased, altered, and minimized by patriarchal systems that allow impunity to reign,” said Monique Wilson, One Billion Rising Director, activist, and actor. “Justice begins when we speak, release, and acknowledge the truth in solidarity and community. ONE BILLION RISING FOR JUSTICE is an invitation to break free from confinement, obligation, shame, guilt, grief, pain, humiliation, rage, and bondage. It is a call to bring on revolutionary justice.

“The path to justice begins with acknowledging how violence is enabled and perpetuated – calling out where endemic patriarchy and institutionalized misogyny creates a barrier to real justice for survivors,” said Wilson.

As part of the campaign launch, V-Day is debuting a new short film called “Rising,” by South African filmmaker Tony Stroebel (“One Billion Rising,” “The Man Prayer,” “Break The Chain”). The film features global event footage from One Billion Rising 2013 and calls up the new campaign for justice. To view the video, visit www.onebillionrising.org/619/risingvideo/

Viewers can also watch the short film on a new website launched today that gives organizers and activists the ability to easily share this year’s campaign information and to begin to engage in dialogue with their communities. The website will expand in the coming months with more features, and will continue to evolve in the months leading up to 14 February 2014.

For more than 15 years, V-Day activists have mobilized in more than 200 countries and worked tirelessly on a grassroots level to demand an end to all forms of violence against women and girls. In the face of resistance, V-Day activists have raised consciousness, changed laws, funded rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters (often keeping the doors open), educated their communities, and raised more than $100 million for groups doing the essential work of ending violence and serving survivors.

ONE BILLION RISING FOR JUSTICE will continue to leverage the strength of V-Day’s activist network to escalate efforts and create change, calling on women and men everywhere to rise in defiance and in celebration, showing the world the strength of global solidarity and the power of art to educate, transform, and inspire.

To get involved with V-Day and ONE BILLION RISING FOR JUSTICE:

About One Billion Rising

One Billion Rising was the biggest mass action in human history. The campaign began as a call to action based on the staggering UN statistic that 1 in 3 women on the planet will be beaten or raped during her lifetime. With the world population at 7 billion, this adds up to more than ONE BILLION WOMEN AND GIRLS. On 14 February 2013, people across the world came together to strike, dance, and RISE in defiance of the injustices women suffer, demanding an end at last to violence against women. Over 10,000 events took place on the ground and the campaign took over media and social media worldwide for 48 hours, trending in 7 countries – 4x in the US alone. The wildly successful grassroots campaign was covered widely by media in all corners of world including The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and many more. www.onebillionrising.org.

About V-Day

V-Day is a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls that raises funds and awareness through benefit productions of Playwright/Founder Eve Ensler’s award winning play The Vagina Monologues and other artistic works. The V-Day movement has raised over $100 million; educated millions about the issue of violence against women and the efforts to end it; crafted international educational, media and PSA campaigns; reopened shelters; and funded over 13,000 community-based anti-violence programs and safe houses in Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Kenya, South Dakota, Egypt, and Iraq. V-Day has received numerous acknowledgements and awards and is, one of the Top-Rated organizations on both Charity Navigator and Guidestar. V-Day’s most recent global campaign, ONE BILLION RISING, galvanized over one billion women and men on a global day of action towards ending violence against women and girls.