V-Day 2006 Spotlight on 'Comfort Women,' Women Forced Into Sex Slavery During WWII

Each year V-Day creates a Spotlight around a particular group of women who are experiencing violence with the goal of raising awareness and funds to put a worldwide media spotlight on this area and to raise funds to aide groups who are addressing it. Organizers of V-Day’s Worldwide and College Campaigns are asked to raise awareness at their events and to donate 10% of their event proceeds to the Spotlight issue.

V-Day Spotlight 2006: Justice to ‘Comfort Women’

On the 60th Anniversary of the end of World War II, V-Day joins women and men around the world in calling for justice to ‘Comfort Women’ survivors. The euphemism ‘comfort women’ was coined by imperial Japan to refer to young females of various ethnic and national backgrounds who were forced to offer sexual services to the Japanese troops during the Asia/Pacific Wars between 1932 and 1945. Some were minors; others were deceptively recruited by middlemen; still more were detained and forcibly abducted. Estimates of the number of ‘comfort women’ range between 50,000 to 200,000.

In the early 1990s, Korean victims of Japan’s military sexual slavery broke their silence and came forward nearly a half century after WWII, followed by other survivors in China, Taiwan, North Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Netherlands, and Timor L’Este. Now the aging survivors are dying off one by one without redress from the Japanese government, which still denies legal responsibility. The V-Day 2006 Spotlight joins the ‘comfort women’ survivors and women’s groups from East and Southeast Asia in calling for justice and reparations for the unanswered war crimes.

With your help, we anticipate that our 2006 Spotlight will help effect real change.