This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Brown chapter.
With Valentine’s Day over until next year, it is time to reflect on our day spent with loved ones, chocolate boxes, and friends, but most importantly, it is a time to focus on loving ourselves. This particular February 14th was marked by the celebration of One Billion Rising, an incredible movement sparked to honor the fifteenth anniversary of V-Day, an organization that has increased awareness of, raised funds for and inspired citizens around the world to fight to stop violence against women and girls. V-Day was established by activist and playwright Eve Ensler, who wrote the popular Vagina Monologues, a play that addresses the social stigmas that women who have been raped or abused face. One Billion Rising stands for the current statistic that one in three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime and seeks to deny the status quo of rape culture, which often alienates women who have been attacked.
In her article for “The New York Times” on the One Billion Rising movement, Amelia Gentleman discusses the rising’s affect in London. In their efforts to prove that One Billion Rising isn’t just a momentary call to dance in support of women, organizers are attempting to have London educators change their school health curriculums to include information about relationships and physical and sexual violence. According to Gentleman, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children found in a study “that a third of girls in relationships ages 13 to 17 had ‘experienced physical or sexual violence in relationships.’” Although it does not seem that the movement has prompted any immediate changes in legislation toward girls and women, it is a great step for women. This new awareness is helping to spread our fight against sexual and physical violence.
This Valentine’s Day, One Billion Rising took over Brown’s campus with a flash mob on the main green, an open West African dance class and several discussions. There was also a screening of “The Invisible War,” a film nominated for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Academy Awards. The film investigates the epidemic of sexual assault within our own military. In the trailer to the movie, it claims, “military women are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire.” Most shockingly, the attacked women are rendered unable to speak out about their attackers, threatened with death by their own colleagues while the men who assaulted them are honored for their military achievements. Although this extreme and clandestine violence is awful to hear about, the voices of these women who are attempting to fight against this culture are the voices of hope. For this reason, I hope that all of the ladies out there will recognize that Valentine’s Day is not only a day to honor loved ones, but also a time to love ourselves and accept others no matter what struggles they have had to face in the past.