About One Billion Rising
“ONE IN THREE WOMEN ON THE PLANET WILL BE RAPED
OR BEATEN IN HER LIFETIME”
UN Women, UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women
A startling statistic
World Wide, one in three women will experience some type violence
in their lifetime including battering rape, or assault. According to
UN Women, UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women because it is so prevalent, “violence against women has become as much a pandemic as HIV/AIDS or malaria”. This violence, unfortunately, continues to be minimized by the general public and by the legislators who fail to create and fund programs i.e. the Violence Against Women Act, to eliminate this violence.
Around the world, women and girls and those who loved them joined a campaign on Feb. 14 called One Billion Rising: a movement to bring attention to violence against women and girls through dance. Over 180 countries participated. Organizers of the global campaign, V-Day, a movement founded by Eve Ensler, invited one billion women to walk out, dance, rise up and demand an end to violence, often with flash mobs, including one in Pittsburgh. This movement grew out of that startling statistic: One in three women will be raped or beaten in their lifetime. Watch live One Billion Rising events around the world.
In Pittsburgh, One Billion Rising was organized by LaTasha Mayes, the Executive director of New Voices, Women of Color for Reproductive Rights. More than 500 women girls and men converged on Market Square at noon on February 14, 2013 to lift up their voices and demand an end to violence. It was several hours filled with positive energy lots of good music and dancing.
NPR and Positively Pittsburgh Live promoted the event with limited coverage from some of the independent news sources and no coverage from any of the other radio or TV stations, including the
Post Gazette.
We need to keep the momentum strong. Violence against women is real and all of us are at risk. Be diligent and demand an end to this violence here and around the world. Unless all of us are safe, none of us are.
