I have just returned from Pakistan where I was invited to support the efforts of women on the ground who are refusing to be terrified and silenced in the face of recent bombings and attacks. This was my fifth trip to Pakistan over the last fifteen years. I was there...

When I saw the petition protesting the recent arrest of Roman Polanski in Switzerland was signed by some of my most cherished artists -- the likes of Pedro Almodovar, Ariel Dorfman, Costa Gavras, Jonathan Demme, Sam Mendes -- men who I believed to be champions of women's and human rights,...

What governor - once an actor, then a Terminator, married to a major women's leader - has the chutzpah to wipe out 100 percent of the domestic violence budget of California, the biggest state in the country, with a single grope of his veto pen?

What same...

In 1996, I was sitting with twenty thousand grieving women in a stadium in Tuzla, Bosnia. The women were holding photographs of husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and boyfriends who had been disappeared a year earlier in a place called Srebrenica, a UN enclave where Bosnian refugees had turned over their...

I write today on behalf of countless V-Day activists worldwide, and in solidarity with my many Congolese sisters and brothers who demand justice and an end to rape and war.

It is my hope that these words and those of others will break the silence and break open a sea...

I spent the last month in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), much of my time in Goma. There, I was privileged to be part of the first public testimonies where women survivors of rape and sexual torture came forward in front hundreds to bravely break the silence on the...

I write from Bukavu, Congo.

Paul Newman -- here's what he and Joanne gave me and I suspect many in the world -- the gift of confidence.

They were the perfect parents. I was 23. I was depressed and fragile and hardly here in this world. I was writing...

I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their...

Forgive me for seeing everything as a play, but it did occur to me yesterday as Condoleezza Rice took the stage on the floor of the United Nations Security Council to talk about the importance of dealing with sexual violence as a security issue (and of course it is crucial...

2008 is V-Day's ten-year anniversary -- V to the 10th-- the celebration, the call, the decision, the next step. Welcome to the next ten years where together we will raise the stakes, go further, go deeper, increase the power and CHANGE THE STORY OF WOMEN.

In...

People often ask me to write a blog, to talk about my experiences, to share my stories, to convey the emotions: heartache; compassion; confusion; joy; that come from the work that I do and the people that I meet.

In my global...

The Law of Security goes something like this. It is almost a guarantee that in the pursuit of security you will become more insecure. Inherent in the quest for security is its undoing. Some recent examples: bomb Iraq to get rid of theoretical terrorists and manufacture thousands of potential terrorists...

Dear Secretary General Annan,

Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Congo, East Timor, Afghanistan, Peru, Burma, Columbia -- the litany of countries where women’s bodies have become the battlefield continues to grow. It is estimated that between 250,000 and 500,000 Tutsi women survived rape during the genocide in Rwanda. Between 20,000...

Dear America: I am longing to reach you -- crossing this river of indifference and consumption and denial. I am trying to find you, reaching out through the desperate limitations of words and descriptions, swimming through the rhetoric of terror and God.

I need you to wake up. The...