Thursday next week will see the fifteenth celebration of V-Day, the date earmarked by charities and activists around the globe to raise awareness for the campaign to end violence against women and girls. The CUSU Women’s Campaign is mobilising with events in Cambridge including a play and a party with live music.

V-Day is associated with The Vagina Monologues, a 1996 play written by author and activist Eve Ensler.  The play is based on testimonies from different women, read aloud with a new monologue added each year to highlight issues currently affecting women around the world. On Valentine’s Day 1998, spurred by the positive reaction to the opening of The Vagina Monologues, Ensler and others founded V-Day as a charity working for a cessation of violence against women worldwide.

V-Day campaigns, held on 14 February each year, are usually centred on performance of The Vagina Monologues and other productions which raise the issue of violence against women. The charity also provides workshops which educate and inform the public on the issue and work to change attitudes in society towards the sexual and domestic abuse of women. This year as part of their 15th anniversary, V-Day is launching the ‘One Billion Rising’ campaign based on the statistic that one in three women, one billion people, will experience violence in their lifetime. The campaign invites one billion women to ‘rise up’ and make their opinions known.

Fundraising for the charity involves annual performances of the play in venues around the world and this year The Vagina Monologues will be performed at Cambridge’s ADC Theatre from the 14th-16th February. The production, jointly directed by Joshua Simons and Lauren Steele, aims to raise awareness for V-Day but also to raise funds for the Cambridge Rape Crisis Centre and Women’s Aid.

Simons acknowledges the power of the play, “The monologues tell eleven powerful, moving and funny tales. It will make you feel angry, sad, happy and hopefully sexy. They manage to delve into the depths of women’s sexuality, opening everyone’s eyes to what it’s like to be a woman.” He ends with the invitation to attend the show and “come and be part of the global V-Day movement”.

CUSU Women’s Officer Susy Langsdale has stressed the importance of V-Day “in the fight for equality.” She notes that “with 13 million separate incidents of physical violence or threats of violence against women and on average two women a week killed by a former partner the international campaign to stop violence against women is as important as ever.”

Langsdale goes on to highlight The Vagina Monologues as the cornerstone of the movement in Cambridge and the importance of the production in raising funds for “two fantastic charities that support women who experience sexual or domestic violence; Cambridge Rape Crisis and Women’s Aid.” She goes on to state CUSU’s hope that “by raising awareness and money we can have a real and lasting effect on the lives of women in Cambridge both in enabling better support and in educating everyone about the realities of domestic violence.”

CUSU will host a ‘Vagina Party’ at 21:30 on 12 February in the Clare Cellars featuring live music,  both to boost awareness of V-Day and to raise funds to cover the production costs of The Vagina Monologues.