The Filipina Women's Network presents English and Tagalog benefit performances of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues to increase awareness about the high incidence of violence against Filipina women and girls. Usaping Puki, the Tagalog version is performed only for the second time in the U.S. All-Filipina cast are community leaders, actors, students, professionals, activists, and homemakers.

Breaking the Silence About the Cycle of Violence
Filipina American women in New York come together in solidarity to speak about ways on how to break the silence, deal with the shame and how to stop the cycle of domestic violence against Filipina women and girls.

Ending abuse against Filipina women and girls is a major concern for the Filipina Women’s Network (FWN), because domestic violence is widespread in the Filipino community and a violation of basic human rights.

Domestic Violence Specific to API Women
Domestic violence in Asian and Pacific Islander communities has some different patterns, forms and dynamics of abuse. There are certainly similarities between all battered women’s experiences; these are not enumerated here. Some of the dynamics Asian and Pacific Islander women describe may be particular only to certain API ethnic group(s); some may be common to many of them. We are trying to develop a complex picture of what is happening in our communities, without essentializing or stereotyping them.

Distinguishing Dynamics

• Multiple abusers in the home: perpetrators may include mothers-, fathers-, brothers-, sisters-in-law, ex-or new wives, adult siblings or other members of a woman’s natal family.
• Internalized devaluation and victim-blaming are that much deeper when there are multiple perpetrators.
• Our women describe ‘push’ factors (“leave the house, give me a divorce, I can always find another wife,” etc.) more frequently than ‘pull’ factors (“come back to me, I love you,” etc.).
• Gender roles are tightly prescribed and more rigid, minimizing female agency and shrinking the space within which women and men can re-define those roles.

Sexual abuse can include
• Excessive restrictions designed to control women’s sexuality; grave threats about sexual activity; being blamed for rape, incest or coerced sex; being forced to marry their rapist; kept in ignorance about sex, sexual health and anatomy; and denied a different sexual orientation.
• Young women can be victims of trafficking: as mail order brides, sex workers, or indentured workers.
• Women face sexual harassment not only from co-workers but from family members, community leaders, clergymen, etc.
• Forced marriages [not to be confused with arranged marriages] can exacerbate sexual abuse.
• Marital rape; extreme sexual neglect; being forced to watch and imitate pornography; and being forced into unprotected sex can result in sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS.

Physical abuse can mean
• Dealing with multiple abusers; severe isolation because a woman has left her home country and thus her support systems; complete abandonment; hyper-exploitation of women’s, including elderly women’s household labor; withholding healthcare and medication; and the mistreatment of widows.