The One Billion Rising campaign is encouraging people around the globe to rise up to end violence against women, by taking to the streets and dancing in solidarity for women’s rights. The idea behind it is both simple and fantastically ambitious.

The campaign spearheaded by Vagina Monologues playwrite Eve Ensler, who suffered abuse from her father as a child. She says her life might have been different had pepole been dancing in the streets for women’s rights back then.

“If I had been dancing in the streets with my mother to end violence against women when I was eight years old — when my father was beating me or giving me bloody noses — I think I would have told him he didn’t have a right to do that. That’s what coming together as a community does — you realize there’s a billion of us! We’re not alone. “

Eve Ensler

According to UN figures, one in three women on the planet will be beaten or sexually assaulted. That works out at one billion women.

The campaign, now in its third year, has taken on many forms this year. In Washington state, coaches put up billboards encouraging boys to respect women’s rights. In the Philippines, 4,000 women did a rising outside a catholic school.

“Every single country in the world picked up the call.”

Eve Ensler