Black Eyed Peas' first lady and vocalist Stacy Ann Ferguson-Duhamel, or Fergie, has decided to lend her voice to a valuable cause.

The Dutchess, who is of mixed Irish, Scottish, English, Mexican (from a great-grandmother) and Native American descent, is an Avon Foundation Global Ambassador, and recently went to Washington to announce a new global initiative with Avon Foundation, Vital Voices, and the State Department to end violence against women.

Worldwide, one in every three women will experience some form of gender-based violence in her lifetime. That could mean assault, rape, domestic abuse, force prostitution and/or child marriage. The United Nations dictates that more women between the ages of 15 and 44 are disabled or killed due to gender-based acts than the combined sum of cancer, traffic accidents, malaria and war-related deaths.

The ongoing global attack on women is an issue that been skirted for decades. Gender-based violence is prominent in America, just as it is abroad; millions of women, on a daily basis, are traumatized by not only the victimization, but also the victim-blaming.

"I encourage women to speak up and not be shamed, to speak up so that justice can be served," Fergie said in an interview after the launch of the initiative.

The State Department, Avon and a nonprofit called Vital Voices launched the program-for-change last Thursday, the name being "The Gender-Based Violence Emergency Response and Protection Initiative," which aims to aid survivors and protect vulnerable women against similar actions.

Ambassador Fergie took to the stage during the launch event at the State Department, and said that the rate of violence against women was "totally unacceptable."

The government-funded initiative has three goals: to provide survivors immediate, life-saving help, like medical care and relocation; deter perpetrators from committing acts of gender-based violence; and help countries implement the laws against gender-based violence that they already have on the books.

While that may seem like quite the feat, Vital Voices plans to continuously work at the effort day-to-day, as overseers of operations.

The campaign has $1 million reserved for seed money, and will focus its initial efforts on four countries -- Nepal, Mexico, India and South Africa, where they believe their work will make a substantial impact. The four nations have laws against gender-based violence, but fail to enforce them. Those in power have made careers of ignoring the suffering of women in their home nations.

"We need training," Josselyne Bejar, penal judge in Mexico since the mid-1990s and served as the current secretary of the Mexican Association of Women Judges, told Fusion at the State Department on Thursday ahead of the launch in reference to how to combat anti-woman rhetoric. Bejar knows the challenges that women face, particularly those in leadership roles.

Training will take place in the form of skill-garnering centers, job-creation efforts, communication workshops, lawmaker input and the development of global advocacy groups.

The former director of the Office of Violence Against Women at the U.S. Department of Justice and current vice president of Human Rights with Vital Voices, Cindy Dyer, will head the implementation of the program, which is designed to last a year and a half, but could potentially become a long-term endeavor.

The organization is looking to train and aid women who were victims or are currently at risk, but the most difficult part will be to beckon the women, to draw them toward the program, hoping to empower and strengthen women; recognizing the time and difficulty involved in changing the behaviors of perpetrators of gender-based violence.

"Until we deter the perpetrators," she said, "until we get the bad guys off the street, this will continue to happen."

The initiative will work with men, who still have a stronghold on power in most of the world. Vital Voices and other organizations will take on the difficult task of getting men to understand that relinquishing power is powerful, and that abusing power is damaging to the entire world, not just women.

Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns has said that gender-based violence is an issue "that has been with us since time immemorial," then added, an "affront to dignity."

RAINN's statistics suggest that 44 percent of victims of rape, abuse and incest are under the age of 17; 80 percent are under the age of 30; 60 percent of sexual assaults are not reported... 97 percent of rapists will never spend a day in jail; and approximately two-thirds of assaults are committed by someone known to the victim.

Related