On June 27 in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, over 1,500 women and men participated in V-Day’s Run Until The Violence Stops. Gun survivor and official “Millionth Face” in Amnesty International’s Control Arms Campaign Julius Arile Lomerinyang from Kenya won the 5K race in just over 16 minutes. Watch him cross the finish line and read his blog here:
Amy Zimmer
http://ny.metro.us/metro/local/article/Festival_seeks_end_to_violence_ag…
A two-week, five-borough festival called “Until the Violence Stops: NYC” kicks off tonight. It will bring together celebs and dozens of local organizations that work to stop violence against women. Metro talked to the event’s organizer, Eve Ensler, about how the event was a natural outgrowth of her play “The Vagina Monologues,” and how she hopes V-Day will become as big as the World Cup.
What does the “V” in V-Day stand for?
It’s victory over violence. It’s valentine. Vagina. All good things are “v” words.
How did it come about?
It started when I had been performing “The Vagina Monologues” and so many women would come up to me afterward and say they had been raped or violated or abused or mutilated. These were stories they had never shared before. I couldn’t do the show anymore without doing something else. V-Day has been going on for eight years. We’ve been doing it in 88 countries and have raised $35 million. We’ve opened shelters for women in Egypt, Iraq and Afghanistan. Now we have to bring it to the next phase. I had been fantasizing: What if we could take over New York and occupy it to make it the first safe space for women? I started it here because New York is my home. It’s a city that is cutting edge, a place where the world comes together.
How will a two-week festival make New York a safe space for women?
First, it’s hard for women to imagine it will ever be easy to be safe around the world. But if you can’t imagine it, then it won’t happen. So just by putting the idea on posters, on subways, on buses already helps make women feel safer. The numbers are shocking: One out of three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime, according to the U.N. Just look at all the ways in New York that women aren’t safe. Most women are afraid to live anywhere but a doorman building. Most women are afraid to walk in parks at night. Women are afraid to wear certain things. Hopefully, we’ll start a consciousness shift and a policy change.
How long did it take to put this together?
We’ve been working on this for eight months. I thought, “What if we could get great writers around the world to participate?” and then we went to the Dead Poets and to hip-hop people. And then we brought women in from all of the conflict zones — from Burma, Cambodia, Iraq, Croatia, the Sudan, Congo, Rwanda — to talk about their experiences. And then another woman working here is a runner, and she said, “What if we could do a run?” So we’re doing that. And another woman said, “What if we did a film festival?” Now more than 60 groups have signed up to hold events in the five boroughs. I just got a call from a church in the Bronx that signed up. We’re doing “The Vagina Monologues” on Rikers Island. We have Asian groups, Latina groups, Lesbian groups. We have a great workshop looking at ways men can commit to reducing violence.
Lately the media has been focused on the World Cup. Do you think V-Day could ever be that big?
Yes, in four years it will be World Cup and Safe World. I think V-Day will take off like “The Vagina Monologues” did. We hope each city will take V-Day on. I don’t believe in occupation and domination and invasion, but I like turning the idea on its head to get New Yorkers to think about what it means for women to be safer here. If you fix violence against women, you fix poverty and racism because if women are undermined and broken and beaten then everything else is, too — the way we’re bringing up our children, the way we’re envisioning our future.
Jennifer Gandin
http://www.timeout.com/newyork/Details.do?page=1&xyurl=xyl://TONYWebArti…
Time Out New York / Issue 558: June 8–14, 2006
Ten years ago, Eve Ensler stormed a New York stage to demand freedom for vaginas everywhere. Since then, she’s been focusing on another type of female empowerment: freeing women from the dangers of domestic violence. After the success of The Vagina Monologues, Ensler launched the V-Day Foundation in 1998, an organization that raises money and awareness by producing benefit performances of The Vagina Monologues all over the world every February. (The V stands for victory, valentine and, of course, vagina.) Next week, she’s focusing her mission here at home, where V-Day started, with Until the Violence Stops: NYC, a two-week, five-borough arts festival that combines celebrity power with local activism.
“We want to essentially occupy New York,” says Ensler, who spoke with TONY after a May 18 City Hall press conference announcing the event. To do that, Ensler dreamed up a festival of theater, spoken word, film and performance, and then used her reputation as both a writer and actor to attract big-name talents. Jane Fonda, Phylicia Rashad and Marcia Gay Harden will read Ensler’s 2001 play about women and war, Necessary Targets, which kicks off the series on Monday 12. On June 19, writers Edwidge Danticat, Edward Albee, Howard Zinn and Alice Walker are among those who’ll contribute original works to “A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer,” where they will be read by Cynthia Nixon, Rosario Dawson and Isabella Rossellini. And on June 21, Salma Hayek and Rosie O’Donnell perform essays written by women in federal prisons across the country. Several other “marquee” events (as they’re called on the website) feature similarly star-studded casts: Marlo Thomas, Idina Menzel, Kerry Washington and Brittany Murphy.
On the grassroots side, V-Day called on dozens of local groups to participate. The result is more than 35 community events, including a self-defense class on Wednesday 14, a panel discussion with women from global conflict zones on Tuesday 13 and a domestic-violence information forum on June 17.
And UTVS won’t ignore the fellas. V-Day Men (a committee made up of male leaders in domestic-violence prevention, such as Jackson Katz, author of The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help) has developed “V-Day Men @ Work,” a symposium that explores the roots of violence toward women. The June 24 workshop also includes a creative session during which the guys will be encouraged
to express their feelings about domestic violence and male gender roles. Then some of these works will be presented at “It’s Hard Out Here for a Girl” on June 25.
“V-Day was born in New York City, and Until the Violence Stops: NYC takes our message directly to the people of New York,” Ensler told the crowd assembled at the press conference, which also featured Mayor Bloomberg. The city itself is helping to spread that message through its own subway and bus ad campaign that graphically depicts abused women. The statistics are even worse than the photos: One out of every eight homicides in New York City is due to domestic violence. “We can’t hide from the brutality of these crimes,” said Bloomberg.
V-Day’s efforts are helping, though. Ensler noted that rates of rape went down in areas where V-Day has presented programs, and that the organization has also raised funds for community-based antiviolence programs and safe houses in places as far-ranging as Kenya, Egypt, Iraq and South Dakota. “It’s clear that we’re having an enormous impact,” she told the crowd. “But [violence against women] is still the issue that people get to later, when they’re done with the other issues.” Across the globe, Ensler has been inspired by thousands of women who have been victimized. “Instead of picking up AK-47s or machetes, they dedicate themselves to eradicating violence,” she explains. “They’re full of a wild, extraordinary energy. It’s contagious.” She’s hoping this festival will fire up a similar ardor here at home.
Until the Violence Stops: NYC runs from Monday 12 through June 27. For information, go to vday.org or call 212-921-9070, ext 11.
ELINOR J. BRECHER
A nonprofit group is creating homes in comfortable neighborhoods for young women who are ‘aging out’ of foster care
Rachel Johnson stood outside the garden apartment that will be her next home as a Metrorail train rattled along nearly overhead.
Nearby, a gardener wielded a roaring leaf blower.
Noisy?
“It’s better than gunshots,” Johnson said.
For the past two months, Johnson, 21, has been living in a shoe box of an apartment on a bleak Liberty City street, the fifth place she has rented since turning 18, the age at which the state of Florida ends custody of foster children.
Come fall, though, she will be in a middle-class neighborhood, The Roads, in a newly renovated apartment, thanks to Casa Valentina, a nonprofit group that creates housing for young women who have “aged out” of foster care.
The group expects the Roads home will be the first of several small residences in well-kept, secure neighborhoods, available to an estimated 100 young women a year in Miami-Dade County.
The need is urgent. About 40 percent of aged-out foster children become homeless, prey to drugs, prostitution and crime.
“Imagine being alone in Miami, after being in 20, 30 foster homes, and somehow you’re going to make it?” said Sharon Langer, 59, a Casa Valentina cofounder.
For Johnson, taken at age 4 from her mother, who ultimately lost custody of eight of her nine children, the group also addresses emotional needs.
“I hope it’s somewhere I can move in and hang pictures on the wall,” she said. ‘I want to get cozy. I want to get comfortable, and I just want to know that, `OK, Rachel, you can make yourself a home.’ “
That’s impossible at her place in a mustard-yellow cinder-block fortress cut up into airless flats, fronting a parking lot, with iron bars on the windows.
Johnson obsessively rearranges her few pieces of furniture in the two tiny rooms that cost $575 a month: a faux-leather sofa and chair, a worn dresser and nightstand, and a couple of shelves, because nothing in her life has ever been permanent. By contrast, the future Casa Valentina is a taupe-colored, mid-1950s structure with original terrazzo floors, candy-colored bathroom tiles and hardwood kitchen cabinets.
Residents, who will be able to stay for two years, will pay about $300 a month.
The building belongs to CHARLEE, a child-welfare agency that contracts with the state to care for foster children. It had been a group home for teens. CHARLEE, having concluded that foster teens do better with families, is partnering with Casa Valentina to renovate the building and operate it for at least five years. Work has begun on the five studios and one-bedroom units.
People have suggested that Casa Valentina could get more bang for its housing buck in marginal areas, Langer said.
“But that’s exactly what we’re trying to avoid. We’re trying to put them in areas that are safe, that anyone would put their daughters in.”
Casa Valentina was born 18 months ago when playwright Eve Ensler was in South Florida visiting her friend Sharon Socol. [V-Day note: Following that meeting, a V-Day Miami group was formed. In November 2005, they staged a benefit performance of The Vagina Monologues as a fundraiser for Casa Valentina.]
She told Socol, Langer and others that she would donate her play The Vagina Monologues as a fundraiser if they had a good cause. They did.
As director of the Legal Aid Society of Greater Miami, Langer ‘lives this issue every day, and said, `This is what we have to do,’ ” according to co-founder Claudia Kitchens, executive director of the Women’s Fund of Miami-Dade County.
The founders expected to raise $10,000 with the production. They raised $195,000, and now have $1 million in the kitty, all from donations.
The cause barely requires a pitch, Kitchens said.
“People have contacted us to say they heard about it and offer money, which does not happen in fundraising.”
Casa Valentina is more than housing; its founders envision a network of emotional support through mentoring for youngsters who may never have had either.
“It’s a sense of stability and safety, which is a real issue for these young women, and an opportunity to go beyond the basic necessities — to work on creating a life rather than just existing,” Kitchens said. The relationship between Langer and Johnson is the template. They met when the Department of Children & Families tried to revoke Johnson’s $892 monthly Road to Independence scholarship, the only government cash support available to aged-out youngsters up to age 23.
To keep it, recipients must be full-time students.
Johnson, taking 12 credit hours at Miami Dade College and working part time, had dropped two courses. Langer successfully appealed the DCF’s decision, and they bonded.
Now Johnson works part time at Legal Aid, and accompanies Langer to Casa Valentina fundraising functions, where she tells bits of her story: No father. Put in state custody because of abuse, which she neither recalls nor believes. Shunted from foster homes to group homes. Running away.
Discussing her future at one meeting, she grew teary. In 17 months, when she turns 23, all benefits cease.
“Aging out was scary,” she said. Turning 23 “is like a second aging out. It scares me.”
That’s where Casa Valentina will help, Langer said.
“What we’d like is to develop an exit plan for our girls,” she said. “Two years go by very fast.”
© 2006 MiamiHerald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miami.com
Kimberly N. Chase
MEXICO CITY – Prior to their appearance in a Tuesday performance of the off-Broadway hit “The Vagina Monologues,” Jane Fonda and Salma Hayek demanded that Mexico resolve the deaths of more than 300 women murdered over the past decade in northern Mexico.
The Hollywood stars accompanied “Monologues” author and actress Eve Ensler, who has staged previous performances of her play in Mexico City, to advocate for better security in the border city of Ciudad Juarez.
All three performers blamed governmental corruption for the ongoing violence.
“This year, right now, we are going to turn the situation around,” Ensler said. “The government has not done the work it should be doing.”
Ensler said “The Vagina Monologues” elevates the value of women and their bodies.
“If you held a woman’s vagina sacred, if you held a woman sacred, you couldn’t murder her or rape her or mutilate her or hurt her,” Ensler said, referring to domestic violence and other crimes, including genital mutilation of women in Africa.
The actresses appeared in the theater of the Hotel NH in downtown Mexico City. Ensler and Fonda spoke through a translator, with Hayek jumping in to clarify certain points.
Hayek spoke passionately about the problems she sees in her home country.
“It’s really an embarrassment,” she said. “In 10 years, it’s not possible to secure this area?”
The Veracruz native said she has taken time off from her film career to advocate for women’s rights, and she vowed to continue her fight until justice is achieved in Ciudad Juarez.
“We won’t let them rest,” she said, referring to the authorities.
Fonda also said that the police should have been more effective.
“I realize how terrible it is when corruption runs through a state, right down to the police,” she said. But Fonda added that she also thinks U.S. corporations have a stake in the low factory wages of the city, where citizens cannot afford sufficient street lighting and guards to create a safe environment.
“We have work to do in our own country as well,” she said.
Nearly half of all Mexican women report physical, sexual, emotional, or financial abuse by their partners, according to Mexican government statistics.
All proceeds of Fonda and Hayek’s performance were to benefit organizations that help the women and girls of Ciudad Juarez.
In Mexico alone, “The Vagina Monologues” has been staged before 800,000 spectators in 100 cities.
Internationally, the work has been seen in 81 countries and is a collaboration of V-Day, an international initiative to stop violence against women.
“I hope this gala will be the event that ignites the Mexican people,” Ensler said.
Brian Bennett
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1186558,00.html
The man on the phone with the 14-year-old Iraqi girl called himself Sa’ad. He was calling long distance from Dubai and telling her wonderful things about the place. He was also about to buy her. Safah, the teenager, was well aware of the impending transaction. In the weeks after she was kidnapped and imprisoned in a dark house in Baghdad’s middle-class Karada district, Safah heard her captors haggling with Sa’ad over her price. It was finally settled at $10,000. Staring at a floor strewn with empty whiskey bottles, the orphan listened as Sa’ad described the life awaiting her: a beautiful home, expensive clothes, parties with pop stars. Why, she’d be joining two other very happy teenage Iraqi girls living with Sa’ad in his harem. Safah knew that she was running out of time. A fake passport with her photo and assumed name had already been forged for her. But even if she escaped, she had no family who would take her in. She was even likely to end up in prison. What was she to do?
Safah is part of a seldom-discussed aspect of the epidemic of kidnappings in Iraq: sex trafficking. No one knows how many young women have been kidnapped and sold since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, based in Baghdad, estimates from anecdotal evidence that more than 2,000 Iraqi women have gone missing in that period. A Western official in Baghdad who monitors the status of women in Iraq thinks that figure may be inflated but admits that sex trafficking, virtually nonexistent under Saddam, has become a serious issue. The collapse of law and order and the absence of a stable government have allowed criminal gangs, alongside terrorists, to run amuck. Meanwhile, some aid workers say, bureaucrats in the ministries have either paralyzed with red tape or frozen the assets of charities that might have provided refuge for these girls. As a result, sex trafficking has been allowed to fester unchecked.
“It is a problem, definitely,” says the official, who has heard specific reports from Iraqi aid workers about girls being kidnapped and sold to brothels. “Unfortunately, the security situation doesn’t allow us to follow up on this.” The U.S. State Department’s June 2005 trafficking report says the extent of the problem in Iraq is “difficult to appropriately gauge” but cites an unknown number of Iraqi women and girls being sent to Yemen, Syria, Jordan and Persian Gulf countries for sexual exploitation. Statistics are further made murky by tribal tradition. Families are usually so shamed by the disappearance of a daughter that they do not report kidnappings. And the resulting stigma of compromised chastity is such that even if the girl should resurface, she may never be taken back by her relations.
A visit to the Khadamiyah Women’s Prison in the northern part of Baghdad immediately produces several tales of abduction and abandonment. A stunning 18-year-old nicknamed Amna, her black hair pulled back in a ponytail, says she was taken from an orphanage by an armed gang just after the U.S. invasion and sent to brothels in Samarra, al-Qaim on the border with Syria, and Mosul in the north before she was taken back to Baghdad, drugged with pills, dressed in a suicide belt and sent to bomb a cleric’s office in Khadamiyah, where she turned herself in to the police. A judge gave her a seven-year jail sentence “for her sake” to protect her from the gang, according to the prison director.
Two other girls, Asmah, 14, and Shadah, 15, were taken all the way to the United Arab Emirates before they could escape their kidnappers and report them to a Dubai police station. The sisters were then sent back to Iraq but, like many other girls who have escaped their kidnappers and buyers, were sent to prison because they carried fake passports. There, they wait for the bureaucracy to sort out their innocence. What happened to the gang that took them? The sisters hear rumors that the men paid their way out of jail and are back on the streets. “I don’t know what to do if the prison administration decides to release me,” says Asmah, pushing back her gray head scarf to adjust her black hair. “We have no one to protect us.”
Women’s advocates are trying to set up halfway houses for kidnap survivors. The locations are secret to keep the women safe from both trafficking gangs trying to cover their tracks and outraged relatives who may try to kill the women to restore their clans’ reputation. But the new Iraqi government has set up several bureaucratic roadblocks. Even organizations that do not receive government money have to secure permission from four ministries and the Baghdad city council for every shelter they hope to operate. Wringing her hands in exasperation, activist Yanar Mohammed says, “They want to close our women’s shelter and deny our ability to open more.”
That means that for girls like Safah, there are few havens left in Baghdad. In 2003, after Safah’s father died, her grandmother took her to House of Children No. 2 orphanage in Adhamiya without the knowledge of most of her family. At the orphanage, she was befriended by an affable nurse who spent hours chatting up Safah, a fresh-faced girl whose fingers are still pudgy with baby fat. The nurse’s modest hijab framed a sweet face that made Safah feel that the nurse was a good, spiritual woman, one she could trust. The nurse convinced Safah that she could be killed over the shame her disappearance had brought to her family. The nurse offered to adopt her. But official channels would have taken too long, so the nurse told Safah to hold her lower-right abdomen, scream and writhe on the carpet of the orphanage director’s office, pretending to have appendicitis and requiring emergency medical assistance. Once at the hospital, the nurse whisked Safah into a waiting car.
The next three weeks were the worst in Safah’s life. “I was tortured and beaten and insulted a lot in that house,” Safah says. She wouldn’t provide many details about what happened in the whiskey-soaked den in Karada. But she says that when it became apparent to her that she was about to be sold to Sa’ad, the man on the phone from Dubai, she became desperate. She passed word of her confinement to a neighborhood boy, who reported it to the local police station. Officers raided the place and arrested the nurse. Bureaucratic red tape somehow kept Safah and the nurse in the same prison for six months before Safah was finally released back into the custody of the orphanage a month ago.
At the orphanage, nestled behind a 10-ft. wall on the breezy banks of the Tigris, Safah can take computer classes, practice sewing and paint portraits of the family she wishes she had. But she doesn’t feel as safe as she used to there. A social worker tells her that the nurse wasn’t at the Khadamiyah Women’s Prison during her last visit. Suddenly Safah rushes out of the room, crying and beating her head with her hands in the hallway. “If she is released,” says Safah, her eyes darting back and forth in a panic, “I’m not staying here.” But deep down she knows she has nowhere else to go.
With reporting by Yousif Basil/ Baghdad, Assad Majeed/ Baghdad
MARGARET FOSMOE
http://www.southbendtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060405/News…
‘Catholic teaching has nothing to fear from engaging the wider culture’
By MARGARET FOSMOE
Tribune Staff Writer
SOUTH BEND — Declaring that Catholic teaching has nothing to fear from engaging the wider culture, the Rev. John I. Jenkins announced today that he will not ban future student performances of “The Vagina Monologues” at the University of Notre Dame.
The announcement by Notre Dame’s president came after 10 weeks of intense discussion and debate among students, faculty and alumni about Catholic character and whether certain artistic performances should be barred on campus.
Jenkins today issued a “Closing Statement on Academic Freedom and Catholic Character.”
In the statement, the priest cited the Gospel of Jesus Christ in saying Catholic intellectual tradition develops through a dialogue with culture.
“How our ancient but evolving Catholic tradition expresses itself in the future depends to a large extent on the work of this and other Catholic universities. After all, a Catholic university is where the Church does its thinking, and that thinking, to be beneficial, must come from an intellectually rigorous engagement with the world,” Jenkins wrote.
“For that reason, I am very determined that we not suppress speech on this campus. I am also determined that we never suppress or neglect the Gospel that inspired this university,” he wrote.
Jenkins launched the campus discussion in January when he announced that he was considering whether annual student performances of “The Vagina Monologues” and a gay film series should be barred on campus in the future. He said he was concerned that the annual events gave the mistaken impression that the university endorsed the views presented in such performances.
“The Vagina Monologues,” written by playwright Eve Ensler, is a theatrical production that deals frankly with women’s views on their bodies and sexuality. It is performed annually on hundreds of campuses with the goal of raising awareness about sexual assault and domestic violence.
Jenkins attended a performance of “The Vagina Monologues” on campus in February, and an academic discussion panel that followed the performance.
“These panels taught me and perhaps taught others that the creative contextualization of a play like ‘The Vagina Monologues’ can bring certain perspectives on important issues into a constructive and fruitful dialogue with the Catholic tradition. This is a good model for the future,” Jenkins wrote.
“Accordingly, I see no reason to prohibit performances of ‘The Vagina Monologues’ on campus, and do not intend to do so,” he stated.
Jenkins said he still believes that the play’s portrayals of sexuality oppose Catholic teachings, but that there must be room in a university for expressions that do not accord with the church’s teachings.
Jenkins said he received hundreds of responses to his request for opinions from students, faculty and alumni about the Catholic character issue.
The gay film series, previously known as the “Queer Film Festival,” was allowed to proceed this year after its name was changed to: “Gay & Lesbian Film: Filmmakers, Narratives, Spectatorships.”
After that name change, the campus discussion focused almost entirely on “The Vagina Monologues.”
Jenkins also announced Wednesday that he has formed an ad hoc campus committee on gender relations and violence against women, which he will chair.
He also expressed his support for student leaders of “The Vagina Monologues” who plan to produce a play next fall written in their own voices and describing their own experiences, titled “Loyal Daughters.”
Jenkins also released a new set of guidelines on sponsorship of campus speakers and events. It states, in part, that faculty and departments must explore controversial issues and departments should act within their disciplinary expertise in sponsoring events. Deans have a responsibility to make clear that sponsorship of an event does not necessarily imply endorsement, according to the statement.
For more about this story and campus reaction, read Thursday’s Tribune.
Alex Kuffner
BRISTOL , RI– Ok Sun Kim was 16 years old when the Japanese soldiers dragged her from her home. For the next eight years she would be a sex slave to the Japanese army. She can’t remember how many times she was raped.
“I cannot get rid of that pain,” she told more than 100 people at Roger Williams University Tuesday night. Yong Soo Lee was 15 when she was taken.
She won’t forget the moonlit night when the soldiers came. Her ordeal lasted two years, coming to an end only when the Japanese army was defeated in World War II. “I cannot tell you all I went through,” she told the audience. They are just two of the estimated 200,000 women who were forced into sexual slavery in service of the Imperial Japanese Army before and during World War II. Known as “comfort women,” most, like Kim and Lee, came from Korea, but girls were also taken from China, the Philippines, Indonesia and other countries throughout Asia that Japan invaded in the 1930s and ’40s. Some were abducted. Others were coerced into servitude.
Kim and Lee spoke at Roger Williams as part of a week-long visit to the United States to raise awareness about what happened to them when they were teenagers. Believing that the Japanese government hasn’t done enough to atone for the country’s wartime atrocities, they are seeking an official apology and compensation.
The women’s trip was sponsored by V-Day, an organization started by Vagina Monologues writer Eve Ensler that aims to fight the abuse of women. The group campaigns for a single issue each year and chose to focus on the plight of the former comfort women in 2006.
Time is running out for the women. Of the 212 former sex slaves in South Korea who have come forward with their stories, only 132 are still alive, according to the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. Seventeen died last year, said Heisoo Shin, a member of the advocacy group who accompanied Kim and Lee on their trip along with a translator. “The grandmothers are dying,” Shin said of the victims. “And still the Japanese government will not take any legal responsibility. What is more important than compensation is recognition of the crimes that were committed.”
Some of the women tried suing the government in Japan seeking an official apology and reparations. None of the lawsuits was successful. Although Tokyo acknowledged that the Japanese army ran brothels for its soldiers, it has rejected claims for reparations, saying that any cases for compensation were closed by treaties years ago. In 1995, a private fund was set up with the Japanese government’s permission to compensate some of the former comfort women, but many of the survivors rejected the money, believing the government itself needed to pay.
Convincing the government to make a formal apology now seems more unlikely as Japan experiences a surge in nationalism. Some far-right politicians have denied that Japanese troops committed brutalities when their country controlled much of Asia. Others have said Japan has made enough apologies for its wartime misdeeds. For Kim, 84, and Lee, 79, nothing will erase the memories of what was done to them. It has been 60 years since the end of the war, but the emotional scars are still there.
Although Kim described her experiences in an interview before Tuesday’s event, Lee declined, saying she could only talk about it once that evening. “It’s very difficult to tell our story over and over again,” she said. Later, the two women sobbed while a documentary film about other former comfort women was screened last night. Kim left the room, unable to watch. Both women were taken by the soldiers to the island of Taiwan, which Japan colonized before the war. They were put in “comfort stations” — long halls separated into rooms by thin partitions.
Each day, soldiers took turns raping them. Kim said that on weekends or holidays hundreds of men would line up. She would beg soldiers to stay longer to delay the arrival of the next man in line. “Sometimes I passed out,” she said. Neither woman married nor had children after they returned to Korea. Both live alone.
Lee made her story public in 1992. Every week since then she has protested with other former sex slaves outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul, South Korea’s capital. March 15 will mark the 700th demonstration without a response from the Japanese government. She wants an explanation. “I don’t know why they did this to us,” she said. “I’m a victim of an atrocity.”
Funmi Johnson
It is the dream of every woman to be loved, pampered and respected. After all, honour they say begets honour.
Sad to say though, the reverse is the case these days, as women and girls from different parts of the world are faced with one form of violence or the other. Research has it that about two-thirds of women in some communities in the country face one form of violence or the other. These range from rape, incest, domestic battery, female genital mutilation, etc
It is for this reason that Hafsat Abiola Costello decided to bring V-DAY to Nigeria using her Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) KIND, (Kudirat’s Initiative For Democracy) which was named after her late mother Kudirat Abiola. V-DAY is a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. It is a catalyst that promotes creative events to increase awareness, raise money to fund anti-violence organizations. V-DAY generates broader attention for the fight to stop violence against women and girls.
Working hand in hand with Ms Joke Silva, a renowned actress, the initiator has been working effortlessly to realize this goal.
Globally, through V-DAY campaigns, local volunteers and college students produce annual benefit performances of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues to raise awareness and funds for anti-violence groups within their communities. In 2005, over 2500 V-DAY benefit events were presented by volunteer activists in the U.S and around the world, educating millions of people about the fact of violence against women and girls.
In the case of Nigeria, Mrs. Costello has teamed up with Ms Joke Silva, whose theater group will stage the Vagina Monologues. The play will be performed at various centers in both Lagos and Abuja starting from 8th of March to 19th of March 2006.
In an interview held at the KIND’s office, Lagos, Hafsat Abiola Costello espouses more on V-DAY. Ms Joke Silva was also present to chip in word. Excerpts of the interview:
What is V-day movement all about?
V-day is about saying no to violence against women, and men, and women to say no to violence against women. The global movement is going to take place in over 80 countries involving millions of people, and the way in which we create awareness to support this campaign is to stage a play called “The Vagina Monologues” which gives testimonials of women from all over the world, all the interest groups, about the violence they’ve endured because they’re women. Violence like domestic violence, rape, incest, female genital mutilation, early marriage, problems that women encounter just because they have vaginas.
What are your goals about V-day?
Our goal is to ensure that at least five thousand Nigerians in Lagos and Abuja are able to see this award winning play and to that end, we’ve been able to enlist Ms Joke Silva, an acclaimed actress, who has been working with all acts for decades in Nigeria theater and she’s now working to make sure that this play translates in our own society, so that the people that come will be really energized, engaged and really excited to be part of this campaign.
:So what have been the challenges so far?
V-day movement requires me to perform the Vagina Monologues and I’ve given aunty Joke the script about a year and a half ago, (laughs) to see if we could do this in Nigeria, and over that year and a half, she talked to people, and she can share her experiences with you, but she has only just now been able to find a group of actors that are willing to perform the play. So, that was one big challenge. Another challenge really for us, is that all over the world where it’s been performed, usually, it’s done for free. All the actors, everything is free. But you know in Nigeria, the cultural industry, the arts theater have not been funded at all .I don’t know what has been funded in the country. Health has not been funded, education has not been funded, so, our art industry is not in a place where they can say they’re doing this for free. So, they’re doing it at a very low cost.
We have to raise the money to cover this cost. So we’ve been really having to go out, to engage Nigerians to support the call by giving money so that we’ll be able to stage the performance. You see, the reason we have to do that is not because we’re not expecting to have the audience, I have a feeling that we’ll have probably a greater audience than we can contain, but the truth is , part of the commitment of V-day as you’ve asked, is to be able to raise money from ticket sales from The Vagina Monologues and to give it to a shelter for battered women or some organization that wants to end violence against women. So KIND from the proceeds of the play will decide to give the money to Sophie’s House, a shelter for battered women in Lagos, run by Project Alert On Violence Against Women. So, we want to really weigh all the production cost, so that as much of the ticket sales can go to the shelter as much as possible.
The exciting thing though, is that, given the challenges that we face about raising the money for production, we have to go, myself and Ms Joke Silva have had to go to a lot of women and men in Nigeria and asked them if they want to support, and you’ll be amazed, they’ll say yes. It’s so surprising that we’re getting so many people that wants to support. I’ve been making a lot of phone calls and when I asked people, they’ll say yes, I want to do something or let me see what I can afford, and I just love that. I love it especially when it’s a woman that says that because, in our society people always say” you women are your own worst enemies”. A lot of women I’m calling have probably never even encountered their husbands slapping them on their faces or even raising their voices at them, and yet because they know that many of our women in Nigeria encounter this violence and other forms of violence, they want to say to these women that they are assisted where ever you are or whoever you may be so long you’re a Nigerian woman, you’re my sister and I, want to support you. It’s very nice.:
You just answered the question I was about asking you and that is what has been the responses of Nigerians so far?
I’ll like aunty Joke to also speak about that.
Ms Joke Silva: It’s been quite fun actually. Like Hafsat said, one and a half year ago, she just got in with the play. In fact it was from her that I heard about it .when I read it, I found out we’re not ready for this. At that time, my company was actually running a film called “Shylock” at Glover hall. So, I went back and I talked to people that I want to do this play called “Vagina Monologues”, virtually all my actors on set were like; fantastic! Aunty Joke, so when can we start, but these are the younger ones in the group. So, I said let me test it out among the older ones, so I just briefly mentioned it to some people and they were like; I saw it in England, I saw it in America, but; are we ready for it in Nigeria? So you know, that’s the kind of response that one kept getting. So we now sat down and said when will we ever be ready? Until somebody brings it to Nigeria, which was what Hafsat did and then you know, I said come on.
I don’t think in Nigeria we’re really ready for any women issue. And then something happened a couple of years ago. I saw this young girl on the bridge,(Falomo bridge), just at the by way to go to Falomo, instead of going on to Kingsway road, there was this young girl, she couldn’t have been more than twenty, she’s fair skinned, and, there she was lying flatly on her face, I can’t forget it, with sparkling white knickers, early morning . And I began to say to myself; there has to be a story behind this.
It’s just not normal, it’s not as if she probably got drunk and ended up sleeping there. Somebody, somewhere must have dumped her there. Somehow, she must have died in some incidence, because she was dead and instead of going to the police that’s what they have done, because it was early in the morning, before 7am and I remember saying to myself at that time that something has to be done about it. So this is like an outlet. Most of the actors that have performed in English- we have professionals actresses performing and we also have people that we call celebrity women, that will also be performing. People like Funmi Iyanda, Morin Desalu and others .All of them are coming together with the professionals because somewhere along the line, they have stories to tell, not against themselves but against somebody that they know. There are some of us ,actually who have had this done to them within our group. What was wonderful about the performance was that, this was an opportunity for people to share some form of the violence that they have seen, and we hope that , that is what the Monologues will do. It will generate discussion and also stop violence against women.
NEW YORK — It was a moonlit night in the autumn of 1943 when Yong Soo Lee experienced the darkest moment of her life — Japanese soldiers snatched her from her home in southeast South Korea. At age 15, she was to become a sex slave for two years in a camp in Taiwan that housed 300 soldiers.
“I was an innocent girl, a daughter of Korea — and that was my sin,” she told a crowd of 40 women on Saturday through a translator, as she wept.
Yong, 78, and another former sex slave, Kim Ok Sun, 83, are touring the United States as part of a campaign to pressure Japan to apologize to and compensate “comfort women” who were used to provide sex for its troops during World War II. The two women were hosted by V-Day, a women’s anti-violence group that kicked off a campaign to promote the cause.
Historians say up to 200,000 Asian women were forced to service millions of Japanese soldiers before and during the war. Several lawsuits in recent years sought reparation.
“I can’t forgive the Japanese government. The Japanese Prime Minister must come to me and ask for forgiveness,” Yong said.
Tokyo acknowledged in the 1990s that its military set up and ran brothels for its troops, but Japan has rejected most compensation claims, saying they were settled by postwar treaties.
According to Heisoo Shin of the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sex Slavery by Japan, 210 former sex slaves have come forward with their stories. The council was established in 1990 to help survivors speak out.
Heisoo said almost half of the survivors died since the first victim went public in 1991. Currently, there are 119 survivors registered with the government and they receive monthly subsidies.
The other visiting survivor, Kim, told of how soldiers snatched her at age 15 amid the screams of her brother and mother. She and her neighbor were thrown in a dirty truck packed with 15 other girls and later shipped to Taiwan.
“I was raped and totally violated,” she said, vividly recounting the details of her eight-year enslavement. “It was so painful, I could hear the cracking. And then all I saw was blood.”
At times, up to seven girls were being raped in one room, as soldiers waiting outside shouted, “What’s taking so long?” Kim said, adding that one of the other captives died after she was raped by as many as 100 soldiers, another committed suicide and two became insane.
When she finally returned home in 1946, she could not tell her family what happened — but they figured out when an infection required her uterus to be removed.
Both Kim and Yong live alone today. They could never marry.
“For a woman, once her body is violated, it’s very hard to feel alive again,” Yong said. “I think of my body as something dirty, and that’s how I think of myself.”
They joined forces with the other survivors and have been protesting outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul every Wednesday since 1992.
The campaign distributed postcards calling for the blockage of Japan’s bid for a U.N. Security Council seat until a formal apology has been made.
“We’re old women, but before the last one dies, we want you to join our fight,” Yong said. “I want us to end the sex violence so that we can live in peace.”
Susan Celia Swan, a V-Day spokeswoman, said despite the fact that violence against “comfort women” happened a long time ago, it is still relevant today.
“This issue ties to sex slavery and violence against women in conflict zones today,” she said. “It’s a story that must be told again and again to help raise awareness.” (AP)
For more information on V-Day’s 2006 Spotlight, visit vday.org/spotlight