Facebook for most opened today with these words flooding their timeline. Women friends in the list copying and pasting a post that said: “If all the women who have been sexually assaulted or abused add #metoo to their status we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem. The degree of abuse being severe or ignorable doesn't make it less significant !!!!!” (sic). Even today, women are encouraged to hush up about the varied kinds of assault and abuse they go through, given the idea it is something to be ashamed of, the idea that they called it on themselves. But how much the women had wanted to speak out becomes clear from these posts. Sexual assault need not be rape, it can be anything from an unwanted touch to a lewd comment on the street to someone stalking you. And women across the world, across ages and races, can relate, nod to each other and say ‘me too’.
“The first step is acceptance. The world needs to know this is really happening, and women need to acknowledge it has happened to them. A lot of the time, you find women saying this hasn’t happened to them because they have been good and protected, and it only happens to others who aren’t,” says actor Sajitha Madathil, who posted on the campaign, relating her own experiences of assault. She too had faced it as an adolescent and an adult, from strangers and friends she had held in high regard. “I’ve come very close to being raped. A friend and I were walking on the road to an STD booth (those days when we still used them). It was after a workshop, and we were on the way to Gurgaon. After the phone call, we saw a few men stop in front of us, all drunk. They just came and grabbed my chest. But because of my age and strength I was able to push them away and run. By the time I came back with help, my friend was struggling for life, his neck blue after being attacked.”
Fathima Hakkim
It is time women opened up so people get a sense of the magnitude of the problem, Sajitha says. “That is true. It will make people aware on how many women face it, and also encourage women to speak out and not silently suffer it,” says Rejitha G, project coordinator at Sakhi. “In 2011-12 we had conducted a study talking to women from Thiruvananthapu-ram, Kochi, Thrissur and Kozhikode and found that most of the participants had experienced some form of sexual assault. But they didn’t realise that at first. They had first said no. It is when we explained, asking specific questions, like if they were stalked, or were prey to lewd comments that they said yes.”
Reshmi
Young artist and architect Fathima Hakkim puts it like this. “Sexual assault is simplified unless we hear it from the people dear to us. We need to speak about it. Discuss it. Open up about it so that someone gets the courage to say NO. I would say that we have to expose the person who did it so that he will not dare to do the same to another. This campaign is assuring one another that it is okay to speak about abuses. The magnitude at which the hashtag is spreading is alarming. No one deserves to be abused.”
Freelance journalist Reshmi Radhakrishnan, who joined the campaign, says it will give a clear picture of what's happening. “It is treated like a casual thing. But it should hit as sharp and noticeable. When people notice the profiles of their close ones with such a tag, they'll know. One gets a chance to overcome the inhibition to share one's own experience of harassment on a public platform. Some may have an unknown guilty feeling about such experiences. After putting this post, two of my FB friends came on chat to ask about it. They had such experiences and always wanted to hide it... at least they shared it with me now. I feel immense compassion and love for them. Like 'I am you', that's what I feel for every woman.”
Swapna Gopinath, post doc fellow at TISS, agrees. “Women should know that it's not their problem and that there are millions of women out there who have gone through and are still going through these abusive experiences. I have been groped and ogled at and heard lewd comments. I felt ashamed and terribly conscious of my body. It took me years to grow over it.” Sonam Mittal began Azaadi, a non-profit organisation for preventing sexual harassment at workplace, after her own horrific experiences. She says, “I've counted 42 women on my personal timeline within a few hours of this going viral. Women who happened to be online and chose to post. There are many more. A secret all women know and a knowledge that many men conveniently ignore.”
The hashtag campaign is believed to have started by Hollywood actor Alyssa Milano. Soumya Vidyadhar was five when she was first sexually abused. She had earlier written about it, how she remembered every detail of it - the room, the bed, the light blue walls, the dull squeaks of the ancient, long-nosed fan and the three faces she had known so well, men who visited her family every weekend, played with her and brought her chocolates. The poet says, “It is not easy to admit that one has been sexually abused. Women are scared of the reactions they get. I am actually shocked by the number of women I personally know who have been sexually assaulted. Two out of three women have been molested sometime in their past. It scares me that women have no control of their bodies no matter how old they are. The scarier fact is that it does not necessarily happen by the hands of a stranger! The #metoo campaign is an eye opener and a shocker. It literally shows us the extent of the violence that women face every day. No one knows the emotional and physical consequences we go through. It is high time we realised that this is not our fault. This is not our shame.”
