2,229 articles
Vicki Morgan
Vicki Morgan, American model and longtime mistress of Diners Club founder Alfred Bloomingdale; filed a 1982 palimony suit, was murdered in Los Angeles in July 1983; roommate Marvin Pancoast confessed then recanted.
Victoria Roshchyna
Viktoriia Roshchyna (Вікторія Рощина), Ukrainian freelance journalist for Ukrainska Pravda and Hromadske who reported from Russian-occupied Ukraine, was detained in August 2023 and died 19 September 2024 in Russian custody in Kizel, Perm Krai; her returned body showed torture signs and missing organs.
Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (விடுதலை சிறுத்தைகள் கட்சி)
Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (விடுதலை சிறுத்தைகள் கட்சி), the Liberation Panther Party, is a Dalit-led Tamil Nadu party founded in 1982, led by Thol. Thirumavalavan, and in electoral politics since 1999.
Vilma Espín
Vilma Espín Guillois (1930–2007), Cuban revolutionary and chemical engineer, Frank País's lieutenant in the July 26 Movement underground, founder and lifelong president of the Federation of Cuban Women, and Raúl Castro's wife.
Viola Desmond
Viola Desmond (1914-1965) was an African Nova Scotian businesswoman jailed in 1946 for refusing to leave the whites-only main floor of New Glasgow's Roseland Theatre; pardoned in 2010, honored on Canada's $10 note.
Viola Liuzzo
Viola Liuzzo (Viola Fauver Gregg Liuzzo), 1925–1965, Detroit civil rights activist and mother of five murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen on Highway 80 after the Selma-to-Montgomery march, with FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe in the killers' car.
Violence
Violence is the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or a group, causing injury, death, or psychological harm.
Violence against Christians in Israel
Violence against Christians in Israel: spitting, assault, and vandalism against clergy and holy sites, mostly in Jerusalem, rising sharply since 2023 and documented by the RFDC and Rossing Center.
Violence against Muslims in India
Violence against Muslims in India: communal riots, vigilante lynchings, and state-linked abuses targeting India's largest religious minority, including the February 2020 Delhi riots (53 dead, 40 Muslim), cow-protection vigilante attacks, anti-conversion law enforcement, and documented police excesses in Uttar Pradesh.
Violence against women
Violence against women is gender-based violence causing women physical, sexual, or psychological harm, defined by the United Nations in 1993 and measured by the World Health Organization.
Violence against women in India
Violence against women in India covers domestic, dowry-related and sexual violence; around 445,256 crimes were registered in 2022, NFHS-5 shows one in three women face spousal violence, and services include One Stop Centres and helpline 181.
Violence and controversies during the George Floyd protests
Violence and controversies during the George Floyd protests: ACLED data show about 95% of demonstrations were peaceful, while contested police use of less-lethal weapons, federal deployments, misconduct findings, and roughly $150 million in settlements shaped the aftermath.
Violet Kray
Violet Anne Kray, née Lee (1909–1982), mother of East London gangster twins Reggie and Ronnie Kray; married Charles Kray in 1926, lived at 178 Vallance Road, Bethnal Green, and was buried at Chingford Mount in 1982.
Violet Trefusis
Violet Trefusis (née Keppel), English-born novelist and salon hostess (1894–1972), remembered for her affair with Vita Sackville-West, her dual-language novels such as Écho, and her Paris and Florence salons.
Virginia Giuffre
Virginia Roberts Giuffre (1983–2025), American-born survivor advocate and principal accuser of Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew; founded SOAR, settled the 2021 New York civil suit for a reported $16 million, died April 25, 2025 in Western Australia.
Virginity
Virginity, a social and cultural concept defined as never having had sexual activity, has no medical or scientific basis. WHO and UN agencies condemn virginity testing; England and Wales criminalized it under the Health and Care Act 2022.
Virginity auction
Virginity auction: an offer to sell one's virginity, usually a woman's, to the highest bidder via escort sites, eBay-style listings, or brothels; most publicized cases, including Catarina Migliorini's $780,000 Virgins Wanted auction, were never completed.
Virtual sex
Virtual sex, also called cybersex or teledildonics-mediated intimacy, is sexual interaction mediated by digital technology: text, sexting, webcam, VR, avatars, and connected sex toys, with documented benefits for connection and risks of image exposure, hacking, and consent violations.
Vivian Cash
Vivian Cash (Vivian Liberto, 1934-2005), Johnny Cash's first wife from 1954 to 1966 and mother of his four daughters; memoirist of I Walked the Line, target of a 1965 white supremacist campaign, and subject of My Darling Vivian.
Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), pronounced "vehement," is an environmental movement urging people to stop reproducing so Earth's biosphere can recover, named by Les Knight in the late 1980s.
W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), American sociologist, historian, and civil-rights activist; author of The Souls of Black Folk and double consciousness, NAACP and Crisis founder-editor, later Pan-Africanist who moved to Ghana in 1961.
WAGs
WAGs, short for "wives and girlfriends", is a term for the partners of high-profile footballers and athletes in other sports, made famous by tabloid coverage of England's 2006 World Cup squad.
Walima (وليمة)
Walima (وليمة, walimat al-'urs) is the Islamic wedding banquet, a sunnah feast hosted after marriage to announce it publicly. Root walam means to gather; best held after consummation, kept simple, with rich and poor invited.
Walk for Peace
Walk for Peace names several peace walks, chiefly the 2025-26 Buddhist pilgrimage of 19 monks led by Bhikkhu Pannakara, 2,300 miles from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., ending at the Lincoln Memorial.
WalkAway campaign
WalkAway (#WalkAway) is a 2018 American social media campaign founded by Brandon Straka urging Democrats and liberals to leave the Democratic Party via video testimonials; boosted by suspected Russian bots, it later became a PAC and survived his January 6 pardon.
War bride
War bride: foreign women who married deployed or occupying soldiers and migrated to their husbands' countries, chiefly after WWI and WWII. Regulated from 1919 (Pershing Bulletin No. 26); the US War Brides Act of 1945 admitted nearly 300,000 spouses and dependents; a 1947 amendment lifted racial bars.
Waris Dirie
Waris Dirie (Waris Diiriye), Somali-born model, author and anti-FGM activist; UN special ambassador 1997–2003; author of Desert Flower; founder of the Desert Flower Foundation in Vienna.
Warren Farrell
Warren Farrell, also known as Warren Thomas Farrell, is an American author on gender issues who moved from 1970s men's liberation to become the men's rights movement's intellectual father.
Warren Jeffs
Warren Jeffs, born Warren Steed Jeffs in 1955, is the imprisoned leader of the FLDS, a polygamous sect in Utah and Arizona, serving a life sentence for sexual assault.
Washingtonian movement
Washingtonian movement: American temperance movement founded in Baltimore in April 1840 by six reformed drinkers who formed the Washington Temperance Society, pledged total abstinence, held experience meetings, and grew to about half a million members before declining by the late 1840s.