UN Women in Iceland debuted a powerful new video on its Facebook page on Thursday. Vísir reports that the video, part of an initiative entitled “Gender-Based Violence is Closer Than You Think,” shows men reading out the true stories of women around the world who have survived sexual assault.
The men reading include Icelandic rapper Króli, as well as former coach of the Icelandic women’s football team Freyr Alexandersson and actor Valur Freyr Einarsson. The stories they read are quite graphic in the details of the assaults they describe and at least one man stops mid-reading, saying he can’t go any further. At the end of the video, however, it is revealed that one of the women whose story is being read is actually sitting in front of the readers.
The video is part of the HeForShe UN Women Solidarity Movement for Gender Equality and ends with a call to “condemn gender-based violence” on the UN Women’s website. The website also includes the full stories of survivors of sexual assault from Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Gambia, Myanmar, and Iceland and outlines the outreach and activism work of UN Women in Iceland.
You can watch the video (in Icelandic) on the UN Women in Iceland website here. Viewers should be warned that it includes graphic descriptions of sexual violence.
