Watson donates 1 mn pound to fund sexual harassment victims

Team Udayavani, Feb 20, 2018, 4:02 PM IST

London: Actor Emma Watson has donated one million pounds to a new campaign directed at helping victims of sexual harassment. The 27-year-old actor has contributed the whopping amount to the UK Justice and Equality Fund after nearly 200 female British and Irish stars signed an open letter calling for an end to sexual harassment in the workplace, The Independent reported. Watson is one of the first donors to the campaign, which was set up by the 190 women who signed the open letter, which was published in The Observer. 

Actors such as Emma Thompson, Carey Mulligan, Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Chan and Keira Knightley, along with a group of 160 academics, activists and charity workers have also signed the letter. The letter comes ahead of the upcoming Bafta awards ceremony, calling it an occasion “celebrate this tremendous moment of solidarity and unity across borders by coming together and making this movement international”. 

“This movement is bigger than just a change in our industry alone. In the very near past, we lived in a world where sexual harassment was an uncomfortable joke; an unavoidable awkward part of being a girl or a woman. “If you have said ‘time’s up’, if the stories you have read in the papers have resonated and distressed you – join us in shifting the dial.

Let’s make 2018 the year that time was up on sexual harassment and abuse. This is your moment too,” it further reads. Women attending the Bafta Awards have also said they will be dressed in black on the red carpet in solidarity with Hollywood’s Time’s Up movement.