A Song Written in Exile and an Album Built as a Courtroom for Human Rights
Veronica Vitale and I Am a Woman emerged into wider view through the FYC process for the Harry Belafonte Best Song for Social Change Award 2026.
What surfaced through the FYC process was not simply a track, but a voice that had been deliberately forming outside the traditional spotlight. I Am a Woman entered the conversation grounded in authorship, ethics, and lived testimony, aligning with a category designed to recognize music that confronts social reality rather than decorate it.
In Vitale’s case, the song reframed attention toward issues that remain urgent and unresolved, including systemic violence, inequality, and the ongoing fight for dignity and safety.
To understand its impact, we need to take a deeper look at the song itself.
Redefining What War Looks Like
When critics argue that I Am a Woman is not urgent in a world overwhelmed by daily wars, Vitale reframes the definition of conflict itself. Not all wars arrive with bombs or explosions. Some arrive as darkness, erosion, and quiet pain. They dismantle lives, families, and communities without ever making headlines.
These are the wars her work confronts.
Her new record and project set to release in 2026 extends far beyond a single song. It is conceived as a multi-layered, multimedia ecosystem (e.i. album, film, manga and more) built deliberately outside institutional dependency. By self-funding and owning her infrastructure, Vitale preserves freedom of speech and freedom of action. The impact is not engineered or scheduled. It grows organically out of lived urgency.
A Manifesto, Not a Moment
With I Am a Woman, Veronica Vitale has only just begun to warm up. As the emotional intensity of the 68th Grammy Awards season settles, it becomes clear that the song is not an endpoint. Vitale has repeatedly described it as a manifesto, not a moment.
The declaration is direct. The song addresses one of the most urgent global crises of our time: feminicide and systemic violence against women. The context is intentionally unfiltered. The fight for respect and safety is not symbolic or abstract. It is happening now, inside communities, workplaces, and classrooms where women continue to be undervalued, unheard, and underestimated. The song positions itself as both witness and warning, rejecting passive empathy in favor of accountability.
Building Against Silence
Running parallel to the political dimension is Vitale’s focus on mental health and the epidemic of silence surrounding it. Her work addresses the quiet humiliations women endure daily, experiences dismissed precisely because they are invisible.
I Am a Woman is designed to interrupt that pattern. Vitale has described the song as a tool meant to break centuries-old cycles of silence. It is framed as an awakening rather than a confession. Across her catalog, she consistently centers survivors of abuse, transforming pain into proof through what she defines as her Soundworld approach, where music becomes a space for recognition, endurance, and recovery.
Beyond the Song: Action as Structure:
The project also confronts tech-facilitated abuse, including AI-generated sexual exploitation and digital violence that disproportionately target women. Vitale aligns her work with global movements such as One Billion Rising, which connect gender-based violence with environmental justice, recognizing that the exploitation of bodies and land often follows the same logic.
Her lyrics and broader narrative increasingly address invisible labor and the global care crisis, a central focus of international discourse in 2026. Vitale calls out the systemic economic failure that renders women’s domestic, emotional, and caregiving labor unseen and uncompensated. Rather than performative empowerment, her work advocates for flexible, long-term resources that sustain feminist movements and the communities they hold together.
The project also speaks directly to post-trauma realities in conflict zones, echoing Harry Belafonte’s lifelong commitment to those silenced by war and state violence. Through potential partnerships with organizations such as Global Fund for Women, the work aims to function as testimony that transforms shame into power.
Vitale openly rejects commercialized feminism. She challenges the hollow “girl boss” archetype embedded in contemporary culture and referenced critically in her lyrics. Refusing algorithmic trends, she positions the Grammy conversation not as validation, but as leverage to demand tangible protections and structural accountability.
Why This Moment Is Urgent:
The urgency surrounding I Am a Woman is not theoretical. It is anchored in realities defining early 2026 and shaping the lives of women across conflict zones, fragile states, refugee camps, and digital environments.
In armed conflicts, women’s bodies have once again become deliberate targets of warfare. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, conflict-related sexual violence has escalated to the point where reports indicate a child being raped every half hour. In Haiti, gang rape is used systematically as a tool of community control. These acts are not collateral damage. They are strategies of domination.
Economic violence compounds physical harm. Women between the ages of 25 and 34 are significantly more likely to live in extreme poverty than men. In crisis zones such as South Sudan and Lebanon, the gendered nature of poverty is unmistakable. When resources disappear, women are the first to skip meals, the first to absorb deprivation, and the last to receive protection.
Displacement intensifies this vulnerability. In Bangladesh and Sudan, millions of refugee women remain trapped in temporary settlements with little or no protection. Sudan now represents the largest displacement crisis in the world, and women in these camps face extreme risks of trafficking, sexual exploitation, and systemic neglect. Across fragile states, women in conflict zones are several times more likely to experience extreme poverty than those in stable environments.
Violence has also expanded into digital space. Online harassment, AI-generated sexual abuse, and tech-facilitated gender-based violence mirror the same patterns of control once confined to physical spaces. In 2026, holding technology platforms accountable has become a global priority precisely because this harm is no longer abstract. It is persistent, psychological, and deeply destabilizing.
I Am a Woman does not attempt to catalog every crisis. Instead, it names the shared condition beneath them: a world that normalizes women’s endurance while denying their protection, compensation, and voice.
This is why the song resonates within the framework of the Harry Belafonte Best Song for Social Change Award. Belafonte’s legacy centered those silenced by war, state violence, and structural neglect. Vitale’s work follows that lineage by grounding global injustice in lived testimony, refusing distance, and insisting that dignity is not negotiable.
Exile, Testimony, and the Courtroom
When I Am a Woman was written, Veronica Vitale was living in exile. Not geographic, but social, cultural, and psychological. The song was born in a bedroom in 2022, during a period when speaking carried consequences and silence was enforced through hostility, distortion, and public erasure.
That first song was not a conclusion. It was the first door.
I Am a Woman opens the passage into a larger body of work conceived as a courtroom built for human rights. Each song functions as testimony. Each section is a chamber where evidence is presented, voices are heard, and denial is no longer an option. This is not an album designed for consumption. It is an album designed for accountability.
Vitale did not stop at music. From that first door, she built movements. She laid the groundwork for foundations ready to activate. Structures meant to protect survivors, amplify silenced voices, and confront abuse, hate, and structural discrimination where institutions often fail. This was never about visibility alone. It was about creating systems that could stand when individuals are pushed down.
At the center of the full lenght project is a clear declaration:
“I built a courtroom for human rights and to defend the survivors of abuse”
What I Am a Woman Is Really About
I Am a Woman is not reducible to a single theme. It confronts Alzheimer’s and memory erasure, mental health under sustained hate, systemic micro-violence, structural discrimination against women, exile and forced silence, survivorship after abuse, poverty and creation without capital, truth versus industry compliance, identity under attack, and justice pursued outside institutions.
It is not a reaction to the moment.
It is a response to the wars that do not make noise.
And it marks the beginning of a universe where art is not asked to explain itself, but to stand as evidence.
The Artist’s Statement | In the Artist’s Own Words
As the project expands beyond I Am a Woman, Vitale has been clear that what follows is not a conventional release cycle. In conversations surrounding the work, she has described the next phase not as a continuation, but as a multiplication of scale and intent.
Vitale describes it this way:
- «We did it with Artist United. What comes next multiplies everything by ten. And yes, of course I am holding the official titles back until the last second. In a time when people use AI just to sound relevant, I am preparing something that cannot be generated.
The surge in AI use tells you everything. People are hungry for content, but also for shortcuts.
What I can safely say is this: I am not coming with a single song. I am coming with a concept. This is a multi-layered, multimedia project. Music, manga, a book, lo-fi playlists, physical spaces, even a bus turned into a moving studio and a podcast on the road. Everything at once.
I am done answering “Can you explain this song?” or “Can you explain this record?”
No. I am putting the entire world on the table at the same time»
Website – https://imawoman.org
