Archive for the "V-Day" Category

V-Day Wishes You a Happy International Women’s Day: Watch Our Brand New “Building the City of Joy” Video

To all of you who have worked so hard to raise voices, funds and awareness, and to all of those who continue to fight for rights and freedoms for women around the world, we at V-Day celebrate you on this 2010 International Women’s Day!

We urge you to go forward, and we stand in solidarity with you and women all over the world today, and every day.

2010 is an exciting year, one where taboos will be broken, and leaders will emerge. To highlight and celebrate this, we wanted to share with you a peek at the building of the City Of Joy, which will have its opening ceremony in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo in late May 2010.


Watch “Building the City of Joy” video >

Support V-Day’s work with women and girls worldwide >

Eve Ensler: I Am an Emotional Creature at the 92nd Street Y

Originally published in:
92Y

Eve Ensler is a best-selling author and acclaimed playwright whose work for the stage includes The Vagina Monologues and The Good Body. She is the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised more than $70 million. Her most recent book, I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World, is a series of original monologues that aims to inspire girls to take agency over their minds, bodies, hearts and curiosity.

Watch Eve on Democracy Now! talking about V-Day and “I Am An Emotional Creature”

Originally published in:
Democracy Now!

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/26/v_day_founder_eve_ensler_on

NEW Report Finds Students ‘Responsible’ For Sexual Assaults Face Modest Penalties (Center for Public Integrity)

Originally published in:
Center for Public Integrity, Sexual Assault on Campus

A Culture of Indifference
Students ‘Responsible’ For Sexual Assaults Face Modest Penalties, While Victims Are Traumatized; Education Department Watchdog Rarely Sanctions Schools

Students found “responsible” for sexual assaults on campus often face little or no punishment from school judicial systems, according to a year-long investigation by the Center for Public Integrity, Sexual Assault on Campus.

According to a new series of stories in the Center’s investigation, research shows that repeat offenders actually account for a significant number of sexual assaults on campus, contrary to the beliefs of those who adjudicate these cases.

“The full extent of campus sexual assault is often hidden by secret proceedings, shoddy record-keeping, and an indifferent bureaucracy,” said Center for Public Integrity Executive Director Bill Buzenberg. “Yet these are serious crimes that go largely unpunished. This is a troubling area of campus life that lacks much needed transparency and accountability.”

The new series of stories in the Center’s investigation include:

A Lack of Consequences for Sexual Assault: Students Found “Responsible” Face Modest Penalties, While Victims are Traumatized >

Lax Enforcement of Title IX In Campus Sexual Assault Cases: Feeble Watchdog Leaves Students at Risk, Critics Say >

LEARN more about The Center’s Sexual Assault on Campus Project >

TAKE ACTION on your campus through the V-DAY & SAFER Campus Accountability Project >

Watch Eve on Maria Hinojosa “One on One” tonight talking about V-Day

Originally published in:
WGBH

http://www.wgbh.org/programs/programDetail.cfm?programid=12

Gabourey Sidibe & Teen Girls Kick Off V-Day’s Annual LA Luncheon

V-Day’s 4th Annual Los Angeles Benefit Luncheon Features Readings By Teen Girls and Academy Award Nominee Gabourey Sidibe

V-Day hosted its 4th annual pre-awards LA luncheon on Thursday, February 11, featuring readings from I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World.

Teen actors Chloe Goutal, Ally Maki (10 Things I Hate About You), and Tanya Tawgenga performed at the Four Seasons Hotel along with Academy award nominee Gabourey Sidibe, and remarks by Eve, Charlize Theron and Rosario Dawson.


Hosts included Eve Ensler, California’s First Lady Maria Shriver, Gabourey Sidibe, Charlize Theron, and V-Board members Carole Black, Rosario Dawson, Jane Fonda, Pat Mitchell, Susan Celia Swan and Kerry Washington, and were joined by Carla Gugino, Dylan McDermott, Dayle Haddon, and Doris Roberts, among others.

The invitation-only luncheon has become an annual gathering for creative women in Hollywood, where V-Day debuts new works in an intimate and empowered setting.

CHECK OUT V-Girls!

City of Joy mentioned in Nicholas Kristof column “The Grotesque Vocabulary in Congo” (The New York Times)

Originally published in:
The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/opinion/11kristof.html?scp=6&sq=city%2…

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

I’ve learned some new words.

One is “autocannibalism,” coined in French but equally appropriate in English. It describes what happens when a militia here in eastern Congo’s endless war cuts flesh from living victims and forces them to eat it.

Another is “re-rape.” The need for that term arose because doctors were seeing women and girls raped, re-raped and re-raped again, here in the world capital of murder, rape, mutilation.

This grotesque vocabulary helps answer a question that I’ve had from readers: Why Congo? After a previous visit to eastern Congo, a reader named Jim D. objected. “Yes there are horrible things happening in Africa,” he wrote on my blog. “None are anything we can do anything about by ourselves.”

“My question is why do you not concentrate on this nation’s poor,” he asked. “Yes, Africa suffers, but you need to look in your own house first.”

Jim D. has a legitimate complaint, echoed by other readers: We have enormous needs at home, and we shouldn’t let foreign crises distract us from them.

But do we really need to say that we can’t address suffering in Congo or Haiti, or anywhere else, because we have our own needs? Particularly when the Congo war has claimed so many lives (perhaps more than six million), isn’t it time for the U.S. to lead a major, global diplomatic push for peace?

Sometimes it’s said that women and children bear the brunt of the brutality in Congo. That’s not quite right; a United Nations official estimates that the population here in South Kivu Province is 55 percent female because so many men have been executed. Women are less likely to be killed but more likely to be tortured.

So can anything be done about this abattoir, or is Jim D. right that it is just one more tragedy to which we must wearily resign ourselves?

One answer is simple: Some people are already showing that it is possible to make a difference here. International Rescue Committee is helping rape survivors recover. The World Food Program averts starvation with its food distributions. And Eve Ensler, author of “The Vagina Monologues,” is working with Unicef to build a City of Joy here to train women — some of them shattered by war — to transform their communities. City of Joy will teach legal rights, self-defense and skills for economic empowerment, and a team of female construction workers is helping build it right now.

“The intention is to transform pain into power,” explained Christine Schuler Deschryver, who manages the project in Congo.

As for whether it is possible to end the war itself, it helps to understand why Congolese civilians are subjected to autocannibalism and re-rape. It’s not just mindless savagery. Rather, after talking to survivors and perpetrators alike over the years, I’ve come to believe that the atrocities are calculated and strategic, serving two main purposes.

First, they terrorize populations and shatter traditional structures of authority.

Second, they create cohesiveness among the misfit, often youthful soldiers typically employed by warlords. If commanders can get their troops to commit unspeakable atrocities, those soldiers are less likely ever to return to society.

So don’t think of wartime atrocities as some ineluctable Lord of the Flies reversion to life in a natural state but as a calculated military strategy. We can change those calculations by holding commanders accountable.

A four-step approach would be:

• Pressure on Rwanda to stop funding its pet Tutsi militia in Congo. Rwanda also should publish a list of those facing criminal charges for its 1994 genocide so that more Hutu militiamen not on the list might go back. A Rwandan war shouldn’t be fought in Congo.

• An international regime to monitor mineral exports from Congo so that warlords do not monetize their militias by exporting minerals through Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. Legislation to do this, backed by an advocacy group called the Enough Project, is pending in Congress.

• A major push to demobilize Rwandan Hutu fighters and return as many as possible to civilian life in Rwanda or settlements in Congo or Burundi. That should be coupled with a crackdown on leaders in Congo and those who direct action from Europe and the United States.

• A drive to professionalize the Congolese Army and end the impunity for murder, torture and rape, starting with the arrest of Jean Bosco Ntaganda on his warrant for war crimes.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to eastern Congo last year was a landmark, but it needs more follow-up from the Obama administration. What is required isn’t some new formula but much greater political will. Otherwise, the fighting will go on for years to come — and this lovely, lush land will spawn even more horrific vocabulary.

An Inspiring New Book to Read (and Perform!) (Seventeen Magazine)

Originally published in:
Seventeen Magazine

http://www.seventeen.com/fun-stuff/17-buzz/emotional-creature-monologues

Life is an emotional roller coaster — happy, mad, sad, intense, quiet — but that’s because we’re emotional creatures! Tomorrow, famous playwright Eve Ensler releases I am an Emotional Creature, a new book of monologues to capture ‘the secret lives of girls around the world.’ But this isn’t just a new must-read book — it’s the start of a whole new movement!

Along with the book, Ensler launched the V-Girls Network on v-girls.org, where you can blog, create a book club, and join voices with other readers on the forums. Just as seventeen.com’s Get Advice! community gives you a place to ask questions about anything online, V Girls gives you an outlet to share photos, videos, and writing that speaks to your dreams and thoughts on the world.

Tomorrow, you can get a copy of I am an Emotional Creature and begin reading the monologues, or performing them aloud with your friends. In the meantime, read on for three questions with the author and our favorite excerpt!

Excerpt from ‘Manifesta to Young Women and Girls’:
Cherish your solitude
Take trains by yourself to places
you have never been
Sleep out alone under the stars
Learn how to drive a stick shift
Go so far away that you stop being afraid of
not coming back
Say no when you don’t want to do something
Say yes if your instincts are strong
even if everyone around you disagrees
Decide whether you want to be liked or admired
Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out
what you’re doing here

Q: You wrote The Vagina Monologues, which are performed at college campuses across the country, to raise awareness of women’s issues and fundraise for anti-violence programs. Are there similar plans for I Am an Emotional Creature to be performed in high schools?

A: It won’t happen right away — first there will be a commercial production, we hope, of Emotional Creature, but after the commercial production, I will do the same thing I did with The Vagina Monologues and let it go out. It won’t happen for a few years…but then it will hopefully become something that can be done at high schools all over the world.

What’s really exciting is that a curriculum was developed over the last year that will accompany the book. With each monologue, there’s a way of exploring and dissecting and creating dialogue.

Q: Who would be some of your dream young women to perform these monologues?

A: I don’t know that I know them yet. I want to discover them. This season, Miranda Cosgrove and we hope Keke Palmer are going to do readings of it in LA. What I’m really moved by is that in New York, Rosario Dawson is directing a benefit reading on February 5, and I’m just knocked out by the girls who came in off the street, who auditioned, who read, who wanted to be a part of it. They’re incredible. I hope we discover the next new fabulous generation of teenage girls.

Q: One thing we always ask around Seventeen is, ‘When I was 17, I was…’

A: When I was 17, I was sadder than I should have been.

Eve Ensler: Advocate for Girls (CBS)

Originally published in:
CBS

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/09/earlyshow/leisure/books/main61…

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 30 percent of adolescent girls have been a victim of physical, emotional or verbal abuse from a dating partner.

For more than 10 years, author and playwright Eve Ensler’s worldwide organization V-Day has raised awareness about violence against women and girls. Her new book is called “I Am An Emotional Creature.”

Ensler, who appeared on “The Early Show” said there’s a lot more violence in the teenage world than everyone thought.

“Many more girls are getting beat up or slapped or kicked and violated in some essential way than we knew about,” she said. “It’s all connected to a larger theme, which I hope the book is addressing, which is girls having rights and girls knowing their rights and girls feeling good about themselves.”

Ensler said in her travels she’s found that there’s an international mandate for women to please.

“(The mandate) is to do what somebody else, whether it’s the culture or the religion or the parents or friends or boyfriends, want girls to do,” Ensler said.

Staying in a violent relationship, Ensler said, is just one example of doing what the boy wants instead of what you want.

Her book, Ensler said, looks at how that mandate is placed upon women, and how girls resist that mandate throughout the world.

In her book, Ensler writes a monologue that begins “Dear Rihanna,” addressed to the singing star who was famously caught up in an abusive relationship with Chris Brown. Ensler writes, “You’re so strong Rihanna. I watch you in the videos. You look right into the camera. You are so much stronger. You could help Chris.”

Ensler said when the story broke about Rihanna, many girls were writing online that Rihanna should stay with Brown, and not dump him just because he hit her once.

“I started to think about girls. How we have the capacity to be, as women, to feel what somebody else isn’t feeling. Sometimes we feel what boys feel or what men feel because they’ve been so disallowed their feelings,” she said. “I think often when girls stay with boys, it isn’t always because they want to be beat up, it’s because they’re feeling their sorrow, or they’re feeling their insecurity, or they’re feeling their grief, or they’re feeling something boys don’t feel. So they’re overcompensating for that.”

Ensler added that empathy is an asset for girls. However, she said, “How we negotiate that and how girls take care of themselves with that asset is a really important thing to be thinking about.”

Vagina Monologues Author Begins Her Quest For a “Girl Revolution” (Women’s Media Center)

Originally published in:
Women’s Media Center

http://womensmediacenter.com/blog/2010/02/eve-ensler%E2%80%99s-mission-a…

Eve Ensler’s Mission: Awaken the Girl Self
By MARIANNE SCHNALL

Eleven years after the launch of V-Day, Eve Ensler sets out to do for girls what she did for women–uncover the truth of their experiences and create a global dialogue. Her new book is being published February 9.

In 1996, playwright and author Eve Ensler sparked a worldwide phenomenon with the debut of her play The Vagina Monologues, which has since been staged in more than 130 countries. Based on her interviews with women about their bodies, the play became the catalyst for women to open up about their own personal experiences. The overwhelming number who spoke of surviving violence inspired Ensler to start the movement V-Day, which has raised over $70 million dollars for anti-violence programs around the world. She hopes that the impact of her new book, I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls, will be just as far-reaching: “To create a girl revolution.”

After the success of The Vagina Monologues, the idea of a work about girls intrigued Ensler, though she didn’t want to simply do it “by rote.” But observing girls in her own life as well as those she met through her travels with V-Day, a central theme emerged: “the girl in everybody, the muted, censored, shut down, diminished, undermined girl in the entire species.” She began to write.

Ensler describes the result as “a call to girls, about girls, for girls, around the world, to be their authentic selves,” to overcome the “pressures that rob them of their originality and power.” Though the pieces are all fictional monologues, Ensler says they are “based on what is real and true” in her observation of the lives of different girls all over the world. Among the girls Ensler creates are a teenager in a New York suburb struggling with high school peer pressure; a Masai girl resisting female genital mutilation in Kenya, where V-Day maintains a safe house; a survivor of rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo; a teen who blogs about her self-starvation. Says Ensler, “I hope it tells these interior stories of girls that don’t normally get told, the secret stories … as opposed to the fantasy version of what girls are living.” She hopes that through the stories, “girls get freed into the reality of their lives.”

Too often, she discovered, no matter their geographical location, girls are silenced. “It’s one universal story with different manifestations, depending on the class, the culture, the community, the religion: how does the culture in any given place, mutate, censor, undermine, diminish and eradicate girls, and the power of girls?” observes Ensler. “And that can be getting a girl to believe that she has to be the size of a pencil,” so that she devotes all her energy to “losing weight and disappearing. Or it can be a girl sold into marriage with an old man in a culture where people cut off girls’ clitorises. Or she can be used to blow herself up in the front line of a fundamentalist war. In all of it she is basically fodder.”

Ensler likens the experience of putting together I Am an Emotional Creature to her earlier project. Interviewing women for The Vagina Monologues, she discovered a world no one was talking about. “It was exhilarating and it was terrifying. And I felt the same thing in the last five years travelling the world listening to girls.” She was amazed by what they are up against, “and it’s also pretty illuminating and hopeful-making to see the triumph of girls over these obstacles.”

She has also begun to identify what she calls the “girl self” that has been largely undervalued and suppressed. “It’s the part of us that’s passionate, and compassionate and associative and intuitive and emotional and resistant,” she says. From the time we’re born, women and men, she says, “we’re taught that the worst thing you can be is a girl. That to be a leader you should never be ‘a girl.’ So it must be pretty powerful to be a girl if everyone’s taught not to be one, right?” That realization is what inspired the title, “I Am an Emotional Creature.” She has been told her whole life “that I’m too emotional, too extreme, too dramatic, too intense, too alive. I started to think, what if I actually saw that as my advantage, as my gift?” It’s crucial, she says, “to respond with our heart–not insanely or without analysis–but I think the missing piece right now is that passion, that outrage and empathy that motivates you to break out of the box to change things.”

Ensler believes in the dramatic medium of a monologue. “You can allow the interior world of the character to speak and be revealed, which is very difficult to do with a journalistic piece. You can explore the poetry of the character, you can explore high emotions, low emotions.” Going deeply inside to understand motives and fears, she says, “is the crucial step if we are going to find a way to transform consciousness.”

In the introduction to I Am an Emotional Creature, Ensler describes the power of girls as one of our “greatest natural resources.” Look at the girl in Africa, says Ensler. Her father sells her into marriage for “maybe a thousand dollars at most. But if she is educated, she will take care of that family forever. Girls’ empowerment is not going to take things away from people. It’s going to feed people and make sure we stop destroying the Earth. It’s going to be responsible for ending wars and bringing up children in more holistic ways. It seems so crazy to me that people don’t understand this.” Unleashing their energy would create “a new wind healing the world.”

Beginning This Month…

Ensler premiered the play, I Am an Emotional Creature, in Mumbai last November, a city where The Vagina Monologues had enjoyed great success. The experience was “fabulous,” she says. “It was so much fun.” Beginning this month, the play is being performed in assorted venues around the United States–all as fundraisers for V-Day programs–including a New York City performance last week by teenage girls directed by actress and V-Day Board member Rosario Dawson. Also in February, a V-Girls campaign will debut, which will include a comprehensive curriculum developed with experts in various fields to accompany the book when it is distributed to schools. V-Girls will create their own web site, “a place where girls can use the tools and the book and whatever they need to engage in a dialogue, empower themselves and become the next leaders.” For more information, visit V-Day.