One Billion Rising:Eve Ensler & Kimberle Crenshaw on Global Movement to End Violence Against Women

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/2/3/one_billion_rising_eve_ensler_kimberle?autostart=true&get_clicky_key=suggested_next_story

A movement is growing worldwide to stop violence against women and girls. One Billion Rising for Justice will take place on February 14, Valentine’s Day, in more than 200 countries worldwide, focusing on the issue of justice for all survivors of gender violence and the impunity that protects perpetrators all over the world. The One Billion Rising and V-Day campaigns were launched by playwright Eve Ensler, creator of "The Vagina Monologues," and highlights the startling statistic that one in every three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. We speak to Eve Ensler and Kimberlé Crenshaw, co-founder of the African American Policy Forum. "Women are putting their bodies at the site where vulnerabilities intersect," Crenshaw says. "By that I mean where vulnerability to gender violence, vulnerability to economic exploitation, vulnerability to the drug war — all these things come together to create unique risks, many times risks that poor women, marginalized women, women of color face."

Sample from Dialogue with Amy Goodman/Democracy Now

EVE ENSLER: There are going to be huge demonstrations and marches and dances through the streets, and then a concert is going to happen. And I really believe there is a set of demands that they are putting forward to the government looking at the time has come for reparations, and it’s very well organized, and I think it will be a very big rising. I was there last year, where about 10,000 people rose just in Bukavu alone. I think we’re seeing, very excitingly, in India, there are tribunals being held across, I think, 25 states. All the districts of Afghanistan are rising. The states—I think every state in America is rising. Thirteen hundred villages are rising in Bangladesh. And many women are rising to look at political crimes—prisoners in Bangladesh, who were held without justice there, and calling for justice for them. I think—

AMY GOODMAN: Kimberlé, can you talk more about what’s happening in the United States, the organizing that’s going on here?

KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW: Well, what’s so exciting about what’s going on in the United States is that it’s finally linking many of the movements around domestic violence and violence against women, in general, to a global understanding that these are risks that women face around the world as a group. One of the problems so far, or at least historically, with the domestic violence movement and violence against women, in general, is that many times people didn’t perceive that they were linked. So, there would be an anti-incarceration movement, for example, that wouldn’t necessarily see the links between having experienced domestic violence or other forms of abuse and that being a start or a pathway into incarceration, or vice versa.