Women's rights are human rights! Through research, advocacy, and campaigning, Amnesty International pressures the people in power to respect women's rights and eliminate gender-based violence. For AI, violence against women is a major human rights violation. It is the state's responsibility to protect women from gender-based violence - even domestic abuse behind closed doors. In Puerto Rico, Amnesty International mobilized the masses to gather signatures to show the public's opinion on the matter to the government that ignored the issue. To do so, we created a campaign that would put into context the alarming numbers of gender violence and persuade people to sign our petition.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, emerging data and reports from El Observatorio de Equidad de Género de Puerto Rico have shown that all types of violence against women and girls, particularly domestic violence, have intensified. 2020 became the bloodiest year regarding femicides on the Island: one death every seven days. Feminist institutions and Human Rights groups demanded a declaration of State of Emergency for Gender Violence, but the issue was not a priority on the government's agenda.

Menstruation blood remains taboo and is considered by a male chauvinist society as repulsive. However, another type of blood is normalized and does not generate the same reaction: the blood spilled by gender violence. We decided to take this taboo and flip it to make people think twice about which blood should be repulsive. We presented statistical data on femicides and forms of gender violence on menstruation pads, cups, and tampons creating and impacting visualization of the alarming statistical data on femicides.

Amnesty partnered with several feminist and social activist groups to spread the campaign. Among them: Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, Movimiento Amplio de Mujeres de Puerto Rico, Proyecto Matria, CABE and El Observatorio de Equidad de Género. AI Venezuela joined the campaign and took it as its own. We decided to launch on November 25th, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, as part of Amnesty's wide-spread efforts in LATAM to fight gender violence. Also, the date was important as people in Puerto Rico were getting ready for Thanksgiving and Black Friday, making our launch date the day with more newspaper readership of the year.

On November 25th, 2020, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, we launched Facebook and Instagram stories in Amnesty Puerto Rico and Amnesty Venezuela platforms and the social pages of the newspapers El Nuevo Día and Primera Hora. In the stories, we censored the data but left the bloody pad's image untouched, warning viewers that it may show sensible content. We followed with an uncensored version directing them to the campaign's landing page: www.thebloodydata.com. They were able to see all the data collected by El Observatorio de Equidad de Género on gender violence. The site prompted users to sign the petition to achieve the State of Emergency Declaration on Gender Violence. We also made newspaper ads, billboards, and regular posts with the statistics. Always prompting readers to sign the petition on our site.

The campaign quickly became news, getting news outlets' attention in Puerto Rico, United States, and LATAM: EFE, Playground, Efeminista, PRPressWire, Latinspots, InfoBae, El Expresso, El Nuevo Día, Primera Hora, and Metro, to name a few. Users from 25 countries around the world signed the petition. As a result, Governor Pedro Pierluisi signed the State of Emergency for Gender Violence Order in Puerto Rico. The order makes profound changes in how we treat gender violence by:

-New statutes that prioritize gender issues in all government agencies.

-Implementation of Comprehensive Sexual Education with a Gender Perspective.

-Deep change in the police and judicial system to serve the victims with dignity.

-Allocation of the national budget to address gender violence.