In Haiti I found that rape, a tool used in the war there, is now essentially normalized and rampant — so much so that hundreds of women report rapes each and every month.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, I heard the soul-cracking and heinous stories of atrocities toward women: sexual torture and raping of hundreds of thousands of women and girls.

Throughout North America and Europe, I am still hearing the stories of women being raped in colleges, beaten in their homes, trafficked and sold in the streets.

In Iraq, there has been a rampant destruction of women’s rights since the U.S. invasion, a rise in honor killings, rapes, and murders of women.

In Afghanistan, warlords, rapists, and murderers are in power, the Taliban are coming back, girls are afraid to go to school, women teachers are being murdered, outspoken women in parliament threatened and censored.

In Egypt and throughout Africa, women are still genitally cut — nearly two million a year.

We have broken through many barriers, we have changed the landscape of the dialogue, we have reclaimed our stories and our voices, but we have not yet unraveled or deconstructed the inherent cultural underpinnings and causes of violence. We have not penetrated the mindset that, somewhere in every single culture, gives permission to violence, expects violence, waits for violence, and instigates violence. We have not stopped teaching boys to deny being afraid, doubtful, needy, sorrowful, vulnerable, open, tender, and compassionate.

We have not yet elected or become leaders who refuse violence as a possible intervention, who make ending violence the purpose of all we do, rather than amassing more weapons and proving how macho and unbending we can be. We have not elected or become leaders who understand that you cannot say you believe in protecting women and children and then support bombing Iraq. Exactly whose children do you believe in protecting? We have not yet elected or become leaders who understand that the mechanisms of occupation, domination, and invasion operating on an international level also influence and direct what happens in the home on a domestic level. We have not elected or become leaders who are brave enough to make ending violence against women the central issue of our campaign or office.

We have not yet made violence against women abnormal, extraordinary, unacceptable. We have not cracked the tectonic plate at the center of the human psyche that is more terrified to love than to kill.

If we are going to end violence against women, the whole story has to change. We have to look at shame and humiliation and poverty and racism and what building an empire on the back of the world does to the people who are bent over. We have to say that what happens to women matters to everyone and it matters A LOT.

Even raising money to stop violence against women makes it something other, something separate from the human condition, from every moment of our daily lives. It creates a strange fragmentation and an even more bizarre fiction. We will give three million dollars to stop rape. We concretize what is abstract and integral because we need to raise money and people feel better giving money to things: a safe house in Africa, a workshop in Jordan, a hospital for women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And so we have constructed an antiviolence movement that has created shelters and hotlines and places for women to run to be safe. And although these places are crucial to ensuring women’s safety, they keep the focus on things or places rather than the issue, on rescue rather than transformation.

It is the culture that has to change — the beliefs, the underlying story and behavior of the culture.

Ending violence against women is not a form of altruism or something you do as a charitable act. It is not something you can even legislate, although laws help to protect women and change thinking and behavior.

I have said from the beginning that ending violence against women cannot be the thing we get to later. Somehow governments, world bodies like the UN, foundations, and local and world leaders have still not made this issue a priority, have not stepped up front and center with the energy, resources, and will to make a difference. We are still, all these years later, fighting for crumbs — morally, politically, financially. V-Day now raises more money than any group in the world to stop violence against women. This is not good news. In one year we raise four to six million dollars. That is the cost of ten minutes of the war in Iraq. One out of three women on the planet will be beaten or raped. You do the math.

Women are not some marginalized, insignificant group. We are more than half of the world’s citizens. What happens to us determines everything. If we are beaten and traumatized, our children will hold that in their DNA and grow up manifesting that in who they become. If our esteem is destroyed, our daughters’ self-confidence will be hard won or impossible to come by. If we are violated and raped or abused by men, our sons will be made in the witnessing of this, and in our bitterness.

Ending violence against women is actually about each of us being willing to struggle to be a different kind of human being. It means not accepting force as a method of coercion and oppression — in our homes and in our world. But really it means examining what is at the root of that need for force. Why are women still muted, controlled, silenced, weakened, and contained? What would happen if they were safe and free?

Ending violence against women means opening to the great power of women, the mystery of women, the heart of women, the wild, unending sexuality and creativity of women — and not being afraid.

— Eve Ensler, September 2007

Excerpted from "The Vagina Monologues" by Eve Ensler. Copyright 2008 Eve Ensler. Excerpted by permission of Villard, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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