One in Four

One in Three

One in Six

Your Family – Your Neighbors – Your Best Friend

Together We Can End the Shame & Suffering

The post They Are Widespread & Hidden appeared first on Guided to Safety.

Thanks to generous sponsors, this event will include live entertainment, food for participants, massage and more!  At 6:00pm the new websites will be ready for judging and at 7:00pm the nonprofit judged as having the best outcome will receive $250.  The general public and media are welcome to come by and watch the process.

We are seeking images of  healthy relationships from within Petaluma and surrounding cities (all races, religions, sexual orientation) for our website (vs canned, photostock images we may acquire from the internet).  Photos may be of couples, families, groups of individuals (ages teen and up); they should be of very good quality and portray healthy, respectful relationships.  A direct view of faces is not necessary – images may simply consist of a couple holding hands (see below image).

We do the reserve the right to crop your image if we feel the need to place the focus on a certain aspect of your photo (ie, holding hands).  We will also ask you to complete a release, giving us permission to use your image.  Your image may be used immediately or at some point in the future when we feel the need to change out images.

DEADLINE to receive images for consideration is FRIDAY, APRIL 5, 11:00pm.  Any images received after this date/time will be considered for future image updates to the website.  Please forward your images for consideration to: GuidedToSafety@gmail.com  (Thank you to those who have already contributed!)

We wish to also recognize our bank and WIMPgives sponsor, Summit State Bank, for bringing this opportunity to our attention!

The post Share Your Face On Our New Website! appeared first on Guided to Safety.

Thanks to generous sponsors, this event will include live entertainment, food for participants, massage and more!  At 6:00pm the new websites will be ready for judging and at 7:00pm the nonprofit judged as having the best outcome will receive $250.  The general public and media are welcome to come by and watch the process.

We are seeking images of  healthy relationships from within Petaluma and surrounding cities (all races, religions, sexual orientation) for our website (vs canned, photostock images we may acquire from the internet).  Photos may be of couples, families, groups of individuals (ages teen and up); they should be of very good quality and portray healthy, respectful relationships.  A direct view of faces is not necessary – images may simply consist of a couple holding hands (see below image).

We do the reserve the right to crop your image if we feel the need to place the focus on a certain aspect of your photo (ie, holding hands).  We will also ask you to complete a release, giving us permission to use your image.  Your image may be used immediately or at some point in the future when we feel the need to change out images.

DEADLINE to receive images for consideration is FRIDAY, APRIL 5, 5:00pm.  Any images received after this date/time will be considered for future image updates to the website.  Please forward your images for consideration to: GuidedToSafety@gmail.com

We wish to also recognize our bank and WIMPgives sponsor, Summit State Bank, for bringing this opportunity to our attention!

The post Share Your Photo(s) with Us! appeared first on Guided to Safety.

Tuesday, April 23
5:00pm
Petaluma Boulevard Cinemas
$10 admission

Hosted by SHE Academy of Petaluma
Helen Grieco, ED

From Academy Award-nominated director Richard E. Robbins, award-winning Documentary Group, Vulcan Productions and Intel Corporation comes Girl Rising - an innovative new feature film about the power of education to change a girl — and the world.

The film spotlights unforgettable girls like Sokha, an orphan who rises from the dumps of Cambodia to become a star student and an accomplished dancer; Suma, who composes music to help her endure forced servitude in Nepal and today crusades to free others; and Ruksana, an Indian “pavement-dweller” whose father sacrifices his own basic needs for his daughter’s dreams. Each girl is paired with a renowned writer from her native country. Edwidge Danticat, Sooni Taraporevala Aminatta Forna and others tell the girls’ stories, each in it’s style, and all with profound resonance.

These girls are each unique, but the obstacles they faced are ubiquitous. Like the 66 million girls around the world who dream of going to school, what Sokha, Suma, Ruksana and the rest want most is to be students: to learn. And now, by sharing their personal journeys, they have become teachers.

Girl Rising is distributed by CNN Films and Gathr, an innovative demand-based theatrical distributor. Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Selena Gomez and other A-list actresses contribute voice performances to the film, which features original music from Academy Award winner Rachel Portman, in collaboration with Hans Zimmer.

Click here to reserve your seat online now!

The post “Girl Rising” – Tuesday, April 23 appeared first on Guided to Safety.

Guided To Safety provides resources and education for the awareness and prevention of domestic violence, teen dating violence and sexual assault.  Programs are provided without consideration of age, race, sexual orientation, religion, gender, educational background or income level.

We are fully volunteer run, have no overhead, and have worked very hard for every dollar we fundraise for our programs.

Please consider taking a moment to
VOTE FOR
GUIDED TO SAFETY!
(see below for details)

The post VOTE for US! appeared first on Guided to Safety.

Too much violence

EDITOR: Whether one agrees or disagrees with, or is perhaps indifferent to, Joe Manthey’s assertion that a U.N. statistical claim and definition of one-in-three worldwide cases of violence against women in the forms of rape or physical abuse is or isn’t really correct (“Misleading statistic,” Letters, Feb. 28), I think that it is even more important to look honestly at another aspect of violence. That other aspect is this: Whether it is just one boy or one girl, or just one woman or one man who has been violated, whether physically, psychologically and/or through sexual molestation, even one violent act is one too many.

KIT LOFROOS
Petaluma

You are so very correct, Kit Lofroos. ~ Guided To Safety board members

The post Too Much Violence appeared first on Guided to Safety.

Join us for our ({V}) Season Finale – a staged production of The Vagina Monologues!

The post Join Us for Our 2013 FINALE! appeared first on Guided to Safety.

What’s political about dancing? The global campaign to highlight violence against women asks us to reclaim public space with joy.

by Jill Filiopovic
The Guardian

One of my favorite feminist quotations – “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” – is widely (and probably wrongly) attributed to feminist and anarchist Emma Goldman. Accurate quote or not, the quote is a feminist mainstay, printed on t-shirts and bags, memorialized in tattoos and on Facebook profiles. Now, activist Eve Ensler has turned it into a movement called One Billion Rising, focused on ending the violence that impacts more than 1 billion women around the world. Its apex is today, and the action is simple: go out and dance.

I’ll admit: I was initially a bit nonplussed by OBR. Dancing? That’s all we’ve got to combat the systematic, worldwide oppression and violence that 70% of women (pdf) will face in their lifetimes? It struck me as too silly, too 70s. Too much about feelings, more “raising awareness” than much-needed concrete action.

But the truth is, violence is tragically one of the ways women around the world are united – regardless of our age, nationality, race, religion, class or culture, our very existence as women in the world is dangerous. We may speak different languages, have different belief systems and face different and intersecting oppressions, but physical and sexual violence against women is sadly universal.

The facts are astounding. Most of that violence comes at the hands of intimate partners, or someone a woman knows. And not all women are equally susceptible to violence. Factors like lower levels of education and income, maltreatment as a child and living in an environment where gender inequity is the norm all increase a woman’s likelihood of experiencing violence in her life.

In many places, including the United States, transgender women, lesbian women and women of color are disproportionately targeted. In the United States, a woman is beaten by her partner every 15 seconds. In Egypt, 35% of women report being physically abused at least once in their marriages; 35% of Turkish women have experienced marital rape. In South Africa, 165 women report being raped every day, many of them targeted because they are perceived to be lesbians or gender non-conforming and the rape is “corrective”; and the number who report their assaults to police are likely a fraction of victims.

Gang rape is apparently a male bonding experience from Steubenville to Delhi. Victims of violence are little kids and little old ladies; other vulnerable women and girls, like those with disabilities or dependent on a care-taker, are also more likely to be assaulted.

How precisely to end that violence is a difficult matter, and one for which there is no single answer. Solutions must be multifaceted, vary depending on context, culture, history and legal codes. There’s no silver bullet or magic wand, and what works in Ohio will be different than what works in Oman. But the one universal shift must be in the status of women. We must be equal citizens. We must have a full range of legal, social, cultural, economic and political rights. We must be safe in our homes, on our streets and in our own bodies.

That basic necessity that so many women lack – being safe in our own bodies – is what made me finally come around to the OBR call to dance. It’s our bodies that are violated. It’s our bodies that are politicized and subjected to laws about what we can or can’t cover or how we can or can’t reproduce or what our families should look like.

It’s our bodies that are blamed for the harm that comes to us, when we’re told that we were hurt because we’re too tempting, too sexual, too ugly, too loud, too easy, too feminine, too manly, too vulnerable. It’s our bodies that too often feel like the enemy, when our own self-worth is worn down by cultural myths that we’re too fat, too dark, too poor, too awkward, too shy, too sexy, too female, too masculine, too strong, too weak, too big, too little.

And so it’s with our bodies that we should act. When our bodies have been politicized, targeted and defined for us, there’s power in the simple enjoyment of that body. When women are supposed to be small and inoffensive, taking up public space is a radical act. It’s unladylike. Dance, OBR reminds us, is both free and freeing.

Will dance save the world? Of course not. And it certainly won’t end violence against women. But any worldwide movement that focuses on the appalling levels of violence that women face and crafts a national day of action to push back against that violence is fine with me.

Creating mass disruption to force people across the globe to consider violence against women and girls won’t solve our problems, but it is a good first step. The next steps must be more localized and specific. Women may be bound together by the violence we collectively face, but the roots of that violence and its solutions are as diverse as we are.

That, too, is the power in One Billion Rising: highlighting a shared problem can encourage the sharing of solutions alongside the recognition that a wildly varied world means varied experiences and requires varied strategies. There’s not just room for growth; there’s a demand for it.

It’s not perfect, but then neither are my dance moves. Sounds like my kind of revolution.

The post Was it a Revolution? appeared first on Guided to Safety.

On February 14th, Guided To Safety, host of V-Day Petaluma, will join with V-Day in the One Billion Rising campaign to dance in solidarity with the estimated one billion women and girls who have experienced violence in their lifetime.

Violence against women is one of the world’s most pervasive human rights abuses. It is also one of the most hidden. Globally, one woman in three has been beaten, coerced into sex, or abused in her lifetime and yet, justice for these abuses is all too rare.

In the U.S., the Violence Against Women Act is a groundbreaking law that helps break the cycle of impunity for violence. Currently up for reauthorization in Congress, you can add your voice to ask for immediate action.

But violence against women is a global issue, so here are the stories of ten real women all around the world to inspire you to WALK OUT, DANCE, RISE UP, and DEMAND an end to violence.

1. Noxolo Nogwaza, South Africa
24 Years Old

In 2011, she was raped and murdered apparently because she was a lesbian but the government still hasn’t made progress in bringing her killer(s) to justice.

2. Cleiner Maria Almanza Blanco, Colombia
Human Rights Defender

In 2012, she was abducted, beaten, interrogated, and raped by a group of unidentified men. Shockingly, Cleiner had been raped previously both by members of the security forces and by Colombian paramilitaries.

3. Claudina Velasquez, Guatemala
19 Years Old

In 2005, Claudina was found dead with traces of semen on her body, yet no meaningful investigation was undertaken by the authorities. In Guatemala, when young girls are murdered, impunity is the norm, and the authorities have a disturbing tendency to blame the victim’s behavior or background for their death.

4. Barbara Italia Mendez, Mexico
Activist

In 2006, Barbara was one of 47 women who were detained and one of 26 women sexually assaulted during her arrest after a protest in San Salvador Atenco. Officials responsible for the sexual assault have not been prosecuted.

5. Ines Fernandez Ortega & Valentina Rosendo Cantu
Mexico, Indigenous Me’phaa Women

In 2002, Ines and Valentina were raped by Mexican soldiers. Despite reporting the attacks, authorities have undertaken no substantive investigation and no-one has been brought to justice.

6. Safia Ishaag, Sudan
Girifna “We’re Fed Up” Youth Group Activist

In 2011, Safia was arrested by the National Security Services. While arrested, she was raped and kicked to the point of unconsciousness. When she publicly recounted her experiences in a video, Sudanese authorities denied all allegations of torture and rape. They repeatedly harassed Safia and her family until she was forced to flee Sudan.

7. Alexandra Hidalgo, Venezuela
Survivor

In 2004, Alexandra was kidnapped at gunpoint, driven to isolated spot, and was repeatedly raped and tortured by a group of men for approximately seven and a half hours. One of the perpetrators was her ex-husband, a former lieutenant-colonel in the army. His lawyers have postponed more than 15 hearings. The trial date has yet to be determined.

8. Norma Cruz, Guatemala
Human Rights Defender

Since 2008, Norma, the leader of Fundacion Sobrevivientes (Survivors’ Foundation), a women’s rights organization, has been repeatedly threatened with death, the murder of her children, and bombing of the organization for her work documenting cases of violence against women and fighting for justice.

9. The Organizacion Femenina Popular (Popular Women’s Organization)
Colombia, Human Rights Defenders

Many of the members of the OFP have suffered attacks and harassment related to their work to promote women’s human rights for women who have experienced violence and sexual abuse.

10. “Stolen Sisters,” Canada
Community Movement

The Stolen Sisters are a group of Indigenous families and supporters who raise awareness about violence facing Indigenous women. More than 600 Aboriginal women have been murdered and disappeared in the past 30 years; Indigenous women are at least three to five times more likely to die of violence than all other Canadian women.

Join us on February 14th in honor of these ten women – and the one billion women worldwide who experience violence. Let’s rise up as one billion bodies to change the current status quo and take action to end violence against women. Let’s show the world that we will not tolerate another day of inaction!

We are ready to move to the beat and shake things up. Join us wherever you are to show the world that the violence Must. Stop. Now.

This post originally appeared on Amnesty’s Human Rights Now blog.

The post 10 Reasons to Move to the Music and End Violence Against Women appeared first on Guided to Safety.

One Billion Rising is the beginning of the new world ignited by a new energy. It is not the end of our struggle but the escalation of it, and while we are all ready to shake the earth with our dancing on 14 February, we are asking everyone to make One Billion Rising more than just a single day of action.

By taking the One Billion Rising Pledge, and asking EVERYONE at your event to do the same, you are helping to finish what we have all started by making ending violence against women and girls THE central issue locally, nationally, and internationally. The world is ready to shift and it begins with you. The One Billion revolution has started and with your pledge it will continue to grow.

Imagine a billion activated pledges. It starts with YOU!

The post PLEDGE to Make a Change! appeared first on Guided to Safety.