Annalisa Enrile, clinical assistant professor at the USC School of Social Work, has been designated a "Vagina Warrior" for her efforts to stop violence against women. She was one of six honorees to receive the award from the Fiipino Women's Network and V-Day, a movement started by The Vagina Monologues playwright Eve Ensler to raise awareness and funds to benefit female victims of violence and sexual abuse.

Ensler depicts "Vagina Warriors" as the women and men who have often experienced violence personally or witnessed it within their communities and dedicated themselves toward ending such violence through effective, grassroots means. She describes them as fierce, obsessed and driven citizens of the world, who cherish humanity over nationhood.

"Being a 'Vagina Warrior' means developing the spiritual muscle to enter and survive the grief that violence brings and, in that dangerous space of stunned unknowing, inviting the deeper wisdom," Ensler says.

An activist in her own right, Enrile frequently speaks out against human rights violations, lending her voice in grassroots efforts to eliminate sex trafficking, anti-militarization and exploitative migrant labor.

She teaches courses on community practice for social change, theory and ideology, and women and social movements, including a seminar held in the Philippines on the feminist perspective in social work and its influence in facilitating social change. In 1996, as a Fulbright Fellow, she worked in the Philippines researching grassroots alternatives to domestic violence. Her academic work continued with research on the mental health of adolescents of color and suicide.

Enrile is also a national chairperson for the GABRIELA Network, a U.S.-Philippine women's advocacy organization devoted to effecting change through organizing, educating, fundraising and networking. Its current work is focused on spanning boundaries and borders to build global sisterhoods for women's liberation.

"I accept this award for all of those women who are fighting and struggling, yet keep going," Enrile said. "It's not enough to save one woman; we need to address the systems that cause violence and work to end violence altogether."