If you’ve known women in your life, as I have in mine, who were victims of violent abuse sometime in their lives and are still dealing with the pain, then you know how important the “One Billion Rising” event held worldwide on 14 February was in demanding an immediate end to this violence against women.

One billion is the number of girls or women who are projected to suffer violent physical abuse at some point in their lives at the hands of men. That’s one out of every three girls or women worldwide. One Billion Rising was, first and foremost, a campaign for women to unify, stand up in great numbers and reclaim themselves — physically, mentally, spiritually — and to do it through dance.

As the event’s organizer, author and activist Eve Ensler, put it: “Dance is dangerous, joyous, sexual, holy, disruptive, contagious, it breaks the rules. It can happen anywhere, anytime, with anyone and everyone, and it’s free. Dancing insists we take up space, we go there together in community.”

One Billion Rising, in essence, took the news stories and cold statistics of violence against First Nations women in the United States, brutal rape-killings in India and many other such stories in many other countries, and placed them right in our hands to see, touch and do something about. Whether men or women, we all have a stake in taking steps to see that such cycles of violence are brought to an end — and not in some far distant future, but right now. Today.

As part of the one-day event of One Billion Rising, many well-known people stood up and declared their defiance of public apathy and shame surrounding sexual violence, and encouraged us to stand up and speak out too. One of them was Anoushka Shankar, the sitar virtuoso and daughter of the late Indian sitar composer/maestro Ravi Shankar. Anoushka spoke openly about having been sexually abused as a child by a trusted male friend of the family and how she still deals with the pain today. Anoushka Shankar is someone whose work in music I have long respected, and to have people like her come out in the media and say “I am standing and rising too” was deeply moving and inspiring.

And it was not just celebrities in the media. One Billion Rising brought to mind for me the women I’ve known personally in my own life, both in the United States and here in Japan, who have gone through the trauma of sexual abuse or rape in childhood or as adults. Some of these women have confided in me how they were raped while on a date or elsewhere. Other women I’ve known have hesitated to come out directly and tell me of their childhood sexual abuse at the hands of their own fathers, but let me know in their own way that it had happened. The evidence of the scars on their hearts and souls were clear to see, in any case.

I remember how one afternoon in the U.S., back in the 1980s while in my early 20s, I had dropped by unannounced at the home of my then-girlfriend’s best friend, M., who I had always treated as a kind of younger sister. I found her lying together with her father (or stepfather), naked, on their living room sofa-bed, sheepishly covering their bodies from my prying eyes with a bed sheet. I walked out without saying a word, and never spoke about it to M. or to anyone else at the time.

Not long afterward, M. started showing signs of unusual behavior in public or at her workplace, such as walking around in a daze, unable to look people in the eyes and to have a conversation with them. She was checked into the psychiatric ward of a nearby hospital apparently by her mother, and when I telephoned M. at the hospital one day to offer moral support and assure her she would be all right, she replied with a sense of hopelessness: “Brian, I’m crazy, can't you see?”

That turned out to be the last contact we had with each other. It seemed to me then, and still does now, that years of sexual abuse of M. at the hands of her father had taken their toll on her mind and body. Looking back now, the warning signs of sexual abuse by her father were plain to see all along, but at the time, none of us had the slightest idea of the trauma she was going through.

There are as many ways of dealing with the pain of rape, sexual abuse or incest, of course, as there are women who go through it: depression, self-hate, a feeling of unworthiness, drug or alcohol abuse, dangerous sexual promiscuity or addictions, a slide into prostitution. Self-destruction, in other words. In some cases, sexually victimized women may then sadly go on to prey on boys, young men or others considered “weaker” than them by society, which just keeps the cycle of sexual abuse going on and on and on. One Billion Rising called for this whole tragic cycle of violence against women to stop, and it really hit home for me when I thought about the women I’ve known in my own life who have been the victims of such terrible abuse in their lifetimes.

That includes too my own mother, recently deceased, who was often badly beaten when I was a kid by our violent alcoholic father. I had tried to intervene and get the violence to stop, and felt helpless when as a child I couldn’t. I can still remember my mother going to work a couple times with her sunglasses on all day, even indoors, to hide the bruised, swollen eye that she had gotten from a beating the night before. If anyone happened to ask me about her injury, she instructed me, I was to lie and say that she fell off a chair while changing a light bulb and hurt herself. So sad.

Now, all these years later, when I watch the short film made last year to promote One Billion Rising, I can feel the power of women as a rumbling of the Earth itself. When I listen to the anthem “Break the Chain” composed especially for One Billion Rising, I feel the power of women to raise their voices in song and raise public awareness.

And when I watch the online broadcasts of One Billion Rising shown around the world and the sheer power of dance, especially Zumba, to move people into action, my spirit soars. Never again will I look down on Zumba as some cheap, pop fad, as I used to think of it. I now see Zumba as being having the power to get people off their lazy butts and do something: Move your ass and your mind will follow!

In the end One Billion Rising left me, as a man, with the strong sense that “change” begins with me: If I want the cycle of violence against women anywhere in the world to stop, then I need to start with my own mind and with the women I know in my own life. I need to change my own judgments about incest, rape, and sexual abuse and violence, and open myself up as a brother, son and friend to women who need such support in their lives. I need to be able to listen to them, understand their pain, love them, and stand up right alongside them when they need my own voice to say “Stop the violence.”

One woman is all women. The sooner we men can apply that locally to our own relationships — to turn unhealthy sex and violence into healthy sexual relationships (“Make love, not war” never sounded better) — the sooner will be the day when violence against girls and women declines globally. The human race has much work to do today to save the planet, and men and women will need to tackle these things together, not separately.

Change begins with me and it begins today — that’s the gift that One Billion Rising gave me on 14 February 2013.

And on that closing note, much love and healing goes out to my sisters, whoever and wherever you are in the world. You are truly one billion beautiful, strong women rising...and rising and rising in even greater numbers in the years to come.