A video has been making rounds online depicting several women marching in the streets carrying placards while bare chested.
The video has gone viral with reports that the women have been protesting in support of polygamous marriage in Venezuela.
This has drawn mixed reactions from social media users with many sharing the video in belief that indeed the women are demonstrating in favor of polygamy.
“Single Ladies in Venezuela protesting against One Man One Wife. They are saying that a man should at least have 3 women minimum,” reads a post on X.
However, a fact check by The Kenya Times has revealed that the information shared alongside the viral video is misleading.
The Kenya Times determined that the video is of a past demonstration in Switzerland against gender and salary inequality and not a protest in Venezuela.
Moreover, it was filmed in the Swiss city of Geneva in June 2019.
Verification of Video Alleging Venezuela Women Protesting
We established that the post featuring a video showing several topless women holding placards alongside a large French-language banner read “No to hypertextualization. Let’s free the areolas”.
Another placard read, “mon corps est sexuel sije veux politique sije veux couvert sije veux nu si je veux” which means, “my body is sexual if I want; political if I want; covered if I want; naked if I want.”
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The women in the video are advocating for rights over their bodies and freedom in dressing, as opposed to the agenda suggested in the post.
Several accounts on Facebook, Twitter and TikTok shared the video with similar captions.
Andrea Florence first shared the post featuring a photo of the women half-dressed on June 14, 2019, with the caption, “We protest so that we can be free to do whatever we want with our bodies. Feminism is revolutionary!”
The caption, which included the hashtags #grevedesfemmes (French for “women’s strike”) and #grevefeministe2019 (French for “feminist strike 2019”), explained that the photos were taken at a women’s rights protest.
Also, the same group of shirtless women with the banner appears in three images published on June 15, 2019, on the page of the Geneva Feminist Strike Collective, one of the organizers of the protest.
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The location indicator on the post showed that it was shared from Geneva, Switzerland close to Le Plaza cinema. Images on Google Street View show the same buildings as those seen in the video.
Why Switzerland Women were Demonstrating
Media outlets worldwide reported on Swiss women holding a nationwide protest in 2019 to highlight the country’s poor record on gender equality and the gender pay gap.
Despite persistent gender inequality in Switzerland, the struggle for equal pay dates back to 1991 when about 4,000 women took to the streets to demand equal pay for equal work.
This movement led to the approval of the Gender Equality Act five years later, which banned discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace.
However, years later, women in Switzerland still earned 20% less than men for the same work, prompting a revolutionary movement in 2019.
The organizers of the 2019 protest aimed to highlight ongoing discrimination in the workplace, including sexism, racism, and homophobia.
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