V-Day Releases A Statement On The Facebook Rape Pages

V-Day joins thousands of activists around the world and organizations like Change.org to urge Facebook to remove all pages that employ sexual intimidation, threat or terrorism expressed in either serious or jocular language.

These pages make Facebook an unsafe place for women and normalize rape and violence against women further traumatizing women and girls in a climate where one out of three are already beaten or raped in their lifetime. Facebook should police pages like these with the same fervor and priority that they have so swiftly removed other pages in the past.

As a movement, V-Day celebrates free speech (we did after all grow out of the play The Vagina Monologues) however Facebook needs to monitor the difference between self-expression and self-expression that violates another being. If we have learned anything in the last 14 years, we know the power of language.

We believe Facebook has a rare opportunity to enhance the current dialogue as you have access to so many users. A nuanced conversation about context, content, and the ramifications of rape-language on women's safety and security could have deep and lasting impact on the ways in which online users communicate globally.

V-Day founder Eve Ensler states, "V-Day calls on Facebook to facilitate a community where women's voices and beings are not muted and traumatized but instead liberated and cherished. Let these terrible pages be where the future of women gets rewritten and let Facebook lead the way."