V-Day: A Global Movement to Stop Violence Against Women & Girls
 by Nancy McShane ©2005
 presented February 13, 2005, at the 1st Unitarian Universalist Church of Springfield

          On April 19, 1989, a 28-year-old investment banker was violently assaulted while jogging in New York City’s Central Park. In addition to being raped, she was beaten near death—when found, she was suffering from deadly hypothermia and blood loss, and her skull had been fractured. The initial prognosis of her physicians was that she would die or remain in a permanent coma due to her injuries, but she recovered fully, with no memory of the event. The crime provoked public outrage. According to a police investigation, the culprits were teenage men who would assault strangers, often in gangs, as part of an activity they called “wilding.” One of the culprits allegedly referred to the assault as “fun” while others described the assault in graphic detail. 

Midnight—Phnom Penh, Cambodia. In the warm, humid night, men seeking sex cruise the groups of women clustered at the edges of parks in this graceful capital city. The typical encounter is brutish, raw. Under a large tree almost within view of the home of the country’s prime minister, a man paws a woman’s breasts and pushes her onto the grass for intercourse. He’s done in minutes; then she rejoins the others. As the hours pass, the scene repeats again and again. The laughing customers probably know that most of these young women have been trafficked—forced or tricked into becoming sex workers. The men seem not to care. They don’t want to hear stories of bitter childhood poverty, of parents so frantic to survive that they said yes to a stranger’s vague promise of a big city “job” for their daughter. 

On March 6, 1983, Cheryl Ann Araujo left home in New Bedford, Massachusetts to buy cigarettes. Her usual spots were closed, so she walked into Big Dan’s, a neighborhood tavern. Inside the bar, Araujo bought a drink. She talked to a woman, showing off pictures of her daughters. She played a song on the jukebox. She watched two men play pool. 

Then, two men she didn’t know asked her to leave with them. She refused and got up to leave. Someone else grabbed her from behind, dragged her to the pool table and threw her down on it so hard it hurt. She was stripped below the waist. While others held her down, several men took turns raping her. 

“I could hear people laughing, cheering, yelling,” Araujo later testified. “I was begging for help. I was pleading. I was screaming.”  

Rwanda, a beautiful central African country, was once considered hell on earth. Just 10 years ago, nearly one million people were slaughtered in a brutal massacre that lasted 100 days. Henriette never imagined she’d live to be 30 years old. Her family was Tutsi, the minority ethnic group targeted for elimination by the country’s ruthless Hutu militia. She says she watched them murder her family—16 members in all. When it was her turn, Henriette says she was raped repeatedly until they were too exhausted to kill her. While they rested, she escaped. Today, Henriette is a tour guide in the country’s largest memorial to this brutal genocide. Henriette’s personal reminder of the rapes is her 10-year-old child she raises with three adopted orphans of the genocide. She has very few friends in their 30s, because most of the Tutsi women her age were killed during the massacres. 

Something has got to be done. We just can’t afford to sit back any longer and allow this to keep happening. It happens every day, you know. Every minute of every hour of every day there is an act of sexual violence going on somewhere in the world. It is happening to those who are vulnerable, to those who often times can’t or won’t fight back. It happens to girls and women and yes, it is even happening to boys and men.  

Sexual violence is crimes such as rape, assault & battery, rape as a war crime, sexual harassment, domestic violence, stalking, female genital mutilation, female infanticide, honor killing, acid attacks, dowry deaths & bride killings, incest and sexual slavery. For every item on this list there is a human story every bit as horrific as the ones you heard here this morning. 

        For the most part these acts of violence are being committed by men. Who are these men? While my heart tells me that they aren’t like the men I see gathered before me today, my head tells me that they are men that I probably come into contact with during the course of my life—at the grocery store, at Wal-Mart, at the Nature Center. I know for a fact that I went to high school with guys like that. 

        Why do some men act out violently against women? There are many scapegoats, from a lack of moral and family values in our current culture to the loss of prayer in our schools to the provocative way women dress. But to blame it on such easy targets would suggest that sexual violence is a product of our modern culture, when in fact it is the world’s oldest crime, that is if you believe the old saw about prostitution being the world’s oldest profession. There was just as much sexual violence going on in the good old days—back in Biblical times, during the Protestant Reformation, when our country was being founded, in the Victorian Era, even back in the good old 50s when McCarthyism reigned. Trust me, rape didn’t come into fashion with the halter top. 

        The World Health Organization has published a list of Factors increasing men’s risk of committing rape:

Individual factors
·     Alcohol and drug use
·     Coercive sexual fantasies and other attitudes and beliefs supportive of sexual violence
·     Impulsive and antisocial tendencies
·     Preference for impersonal sex
·     Hostility towards women
·     History of sexual abuse as a child
·     Witnessed family violence as a child

Relationship factors
·     Associate with sexually aggressive and delinquent peers
·     Family environment characterized by physical violence and few resources
·     Strongly patriarchal relationship or family environment
·     Emotionally unsupportive family environment
·     Family honor considered more important than the health and safety of the victim

Community factors
·     Poverty, mediated through forms of crisis of male identity
·     Lack of employment opportunities
·     Lack of institutional support from police and judicial system
·     General tolerance of sexual assault within the community
·     Weak community sanctions against perpetrators of sexual violence

Societal factors
·     Societal norms supportive of sexual violence
·     Societal norms supportive of male superiority and sexual entitlement
·     Weak laws and policies related to sexual violence
·     Weak laws and policies related to gender equality
·     High levels of crime and other forms of violence

So what can we, as members of 1st UU Springfield, do to counteract this plague when it seems like such a Sisyphean task? We’ve got a start on part of it. We need to continue to support our OWLs program to promote age-appropriate sexual health education to our young people, and we ought to offer it to a wider audience in the community. I’m sure we’re not the only people in town who are disgusted by the abstinence-only education offered in the public schools. Our OWLs curriculum teaches respect for self and others as a cornerstone to a healthy relationship, sexual or otherwise.

We’ve also formed a Women’s Alliance that will help strengthen the bonds between the generations of women in this congregation, helping to ensure that our young girls will be raised in an atmosphere that will nurture their self-respect and empower them to protect themselves against the violence that exists out there. We have a lot of wisdom to pass on, and unfortunately some of it is first-hand information on sexual violence. We have to tell the girls that when they say “no” they’ve got to say “no” like they mean it. Trust me, I’d rather pass on the secret to a flaky pie crust, but first things first. This is more important. Until we’ve got this problem under control I say, hell, use the roll up pie crust from the refrigerator section. 

What else can we do? I’m going to sound like a broken record here, but I think we need to start a Men’s Alliance, or a Guy’s Group or the Fix-it Committee or whatever you want to call it. However it is structured, I think we need a place for the men and boys to get together to shoot hoops or build shelves or something and shoot the breeze. So that my son can hear from you fine gentlemen out there that when a girl says “no”, she means “no!” and that nobody ever died from “blue balls.” I want my son to see that you respect and value him so that he can respect and value himself. That, in turn, will help him learn to respect and value those around him; his peers as well as the girls that one day, God help me, he’s going to ask out on dates. 

          That’s what we can do right here in our church. Reaching out into the local community we can support the work of the Family Violence Center, the Rape Crisis Center and Planned Parenthood. Nationally and internationally there are dozens of organizations which help women and girls escape the bonds of sexual violence. You can find a good list of them on the V-Day.org web site. 

          Which brings me, in a round-about way, to the title of this sermon. V-Day is a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. V-Day was born in 1998 as an outgrowth of Eve Ensler’s Obie-Award winning play, “The Vagina Monologues.” As Eve performed the piece in small towns and large cities all around the world, she saw and heard first hand the destructive personal, social, political and economic consequences violence against women has for many nations. 

Hundreds of women told her their stories of rape, incest, domestic battery and genital mutilation. It was clear that something widespread and dramatic needed to be done to stop the violence. A group of women in New York joined Eve and founded V-Day . . . a catalyst, a movement, a performance. 

V-Day’s mission is simple. It demands that the violence must end. It proclaims Valentine’s Day as V-Day until the violence stops. When all women live in safety, no longer fearing violence or the threat of violence, then V-Day will be known as Victory Over Violence Day. Then, according to Eve, we will be living in a V-World. 

Here’s what V-World will look like: 

When the violence stops, women and girls will be:
·     Allowed to be born in China, India and Korea
·     Swimming in Iran
·     Safe in their beds at home in the United States, Europe and Asia
·     Eating ice cream in Afghanistan
·     Keeping their clitorises in Africa and Asia
·     Wearing blue jeans in Italy
·     Voting in Kuwait
·     Walking in the park at night in the United States
·     Openly flirting in Jordan
·     Safe at parties on college campuses
·     Playing with toys and not being sold as them in Asia, the United States, Europe and Eastern Europe
·     Driving cars in Saudi Arabia
·     Wearing trousers in Swaziland
·     Safely walking home from work in Juarez, Mexico
·     Enjoying sex
·     Celebrating their desires
·     Loving their bodies
·     Running the world 

I urge you to expand this list and put your power behind the vision. 

        So be it.