18 Day Campaign to End Violence Against Women and Children – November 2023

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”                                                     

Lady Liberty, New York

“I eat death threats for breakfast.”

The late Miriam Defensor Santiago, Manila

How many women have come to me seeking aid? I mourn our Filipinas, rare among them the ones not assaulted or harassed. Looks matter not, attire matters not to the sick dogs who know neither self-control nor consequence. I mourn our Filipinas, so many practically enslaved in distant lands, sometimes murdered, sometimes dismembered, frozen or buried or scattered in vast deserts. Blinded. Maimed. Trapped in the homes of their abusers, or freed but still trapped in minds afflicted by trauma.

How rare is justice? How rare is good health? How rare is freedom from fear, freedom from the threats of the savage and remorseless and those who fail to stop them? I have known true evil, and I have suffered, too. But I have learned and I have had to learn to find my strength, my voice, and my means to fight back. And with this knowledge, I offer to forge other survivors into warriors, rising to stand by my side until our world is transformed into a more just society, where no woman or girl will need to know fear in order to survive.

Now I stand among you as a warrior, my sword as my shield, and myself as the shield for other women and children so they will be victims no longer, now or ever. Send me every victim. Together and empowered, we will find justice, and evil will learn to fear.

-Project URDUHA, Pasay, 24 November 2023