Speaking Up About Assault is Not a ‘Trend’ — It is a Chain Reaction
By: Stark Raving
Tags: Equality, Women, Writing, This Happened To Me, Feminism

Speaking Up About Assault is Not a ‘Trend’ — It is a Chain Reaction

Each woman that tells her story gives strength to others.

When the #MeToo movement happened, I spent days glued to my computer, reading one heartwrenching post after another. I didn’t eat and barely slept. It felt like I was being carried away by a devastating tsunami, and every story I read felt like an echo of pain I had felt and was experiencing all over again. It hurt like hell, but it felt good at the same time because finally, I was not alone. Other people had lived these terrible things and survived them and were just as angry about them.

It set something free inside of me. If those women hadn’t spoken up in their millions, I would never have the courage to share my experiences, abusers attempts at the annihilation of my being. And I certainly wouldn't have the strength to deal with the horrible reactions you get when you do speak up.

Mostly the reactions are cliché as can be, they come straight from the How-To guide to being a sexist idiot. They cast doubt on what happened, they tell you it was your fault, or they tell you it isn’t that bad and that you should just suck it up. They mansplain your feelings or attempt to justify the assailant’s behaviour. Or they say you are attention-seeking and just following the “trend” of telling your rape story.

These comments all share the same aim: to prevent women from speaking up by creating a hostile environment when they do. They are written by men who are unhappy to hear about the assault, who would rather it happen in silence because they don’t care enough about women to want things to change, and they don’t see us as human enough to empathise.

I’d like to unpack this last argument — the idea that speaking up about assault is a ‘trend’, that we are doing it to be cool and to get attention. This reaction is upsetting in so many ways, and it is also fundamentally false.

As you’ll have surmised already from this article, the reactions to our stories aren’t exactly pleasant. You’re vulnerable enough when you are sharing such experiences, and to have them met with hostility and victim-blaming hurts.

And to be honest, even if we were attention-seeking, there is nothing wrong with that. Especially when what you are drawing attention to is a societal problem that is causing trauma for millions of survivors.

That sheer number is why it may feel like a ‘trend’ — it isn’t that people are jumping on the bandwagon, there are just that many cases. There are so many stories to be told. What should be surprising us isn’t how many of these stories we are hearing, but what that says of the number of cases left untold.

The reason that voices are opening now isn’t that it’s ‘in fashion’, but that each woman who tells her story makes it easy for those that come after her. When we read such stories we know that we are allowed to speak up. We know that there are words for our experiences and that they are worthy of being told. It shows that no experiences of assault are black and white, contrary to what we have learned, and so it makes it easier to see our grey-shrouded stories for the assault that they are.

We may also feel a duty of reciprocity. If someone else is brave enough to tell their story to help others, it can make us feel like we too can make that gesture for our sisters.

Speaking up about rape stories isn’t a trend — it’s a chain reaction, one woman empowering the next. Giving us strength — strength enough to deal with the vile reactions. It’s worth it all, just for one comment from a woman who has had a similar experience, who has been moved by our words.