The Garden of Hope Foundation, together with HappyRecome, held a charity fair at the Huashan 1914 Creative Park yesterday to raise funds for abused women and their children, and to raise public awareness about violence against women.
Fifty stands with products ranging from coffee to Aboriginal agricultural goods were on show to highlight the cause of women who have suffered violent assault, and for children who have witnessed such violence.
“Last year there were reported more than 50,000 cases of violence by partners, and more than 10,000 sexual assaults in Taiwan. Eighty-five percent of the victims of such violence were women,” said Wang Shu-fen (王淑芬), the foundation’s Taipei office director.
The foundation, which also headed the US-based One Billion Rising campaign in Taiwan in February to push for an end to violence against women, found that 41.5 percent of Taiwanese women have experienced violence in their lifetime.
This figure is much higher than statistics provided by the UN, which indicated that one in every three women in the world has been beaten, coerced into sex, or abused in some other way.
“We hope the event raises public awareness and galvanizes the public to be concerned about women around them who might be victims of violence,” Wang said.
“We have come to realize that the campaign should also target men, who play a crucial role in this social phenomenon. And that’s why we also staged the ‘V-men’ campaign today,” Wang added.
Described as a “tender revolution,” the V-men campaign calls on men to give compliments instead of criticism, replace fists with hugs, avoid buying sex, stop verbal sexual harassment and be friendly to women.
Echoing the international V-day campaign started by Eve Ensler, the plawright of The Vagina Monologues, the campaign at the fair invited men to experience what it is like to be a woman by having them wear high-heeled shoes and skirts.
“This is an activity that emulates the Canadian ‘Walk a Mile in Her Shoes’ campaign, which is based on the old saying that: ‘You can’t really understand another person’s experience until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes,’” Wang said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching