Jasmine Foong looks inside the #MeToo movement and talks to experts about issues with how it helps
The #MeToo movement had seemed to be bringing justice to victims of sexual assault, bringing down their abusers’ careers and reputations.
Victims and survivors—especially in the U.S. and Canada—said they suddenly felt empowered when they spoke up about their experiences with sexual violence.
One high-profile case of sexual violence allegations after another—from Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein to actor Bill Cosby—caused an uproar across social media, with millions of people sharing their experiences of sexual violence with the hashtag #MeToo.
The New York Times published a story detailing five separate sexual misconduct allegations against stand-up comedian Louis C.K., leading to a series of cancellations on his TV appearances.
Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman, who starred in movies such as Shawshank Redemption and Driving Miss Daisy, was accused of sexual and verbal assault by eight different women earlier this year.
Stand-up comedian and actor Bill Cosby, who had been repeatedly accused of sexual abuse allegations by various women, underwent his first trial in June 2017. Although it ended in a mistrial, he underwent a retrial one year later after the #MeToo uprising, where he was found guilty and sentenced to three to 10 years in state prison.
Then, almost one year after the movement took off and changed the discourse around sexual assault, American psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford publicly alleged then-U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a high school party back in 1982.
She recounted Kavanaugh holding her down on a bed, covering her mouth while she tried to scream, all the while groping her and trying to take her clothes off.
Ford’s testimony failed to derail the Senate’s decision, and Kavanaugh was allowed to take his place on the Supreme Court of the United States on Oct. 6, 2018.
As of November 2018, Ford and her family have been consistently receiving death threats for speaking out against Justice Kavanaugh. She has had to move four times and hasn’t been able to return to her job at Palo Alto University.
While the #MeToo movement has dramatically raised the confidence with which victims of sexual assault come forward about their abuse, the incident between Ford and Justice Kavanaugh provoked outcries from feminist movements all over U.S., Canada, and around the world.
Experts and long-time support workers from Ottawa said that the #MeToo movement, despite being empowering for some, has left others feeling afraid of the backlash that could follow if they came forward about their abuse.
What’s with #MeToo?
Caitlin Salvino, former chair of OurTurn, a national student organization that aims to fight sexual violence on post-secondary campuses in Canada, said she personally experienced the paradigm shift with recognizing rape culture after the #MeToo explosion.
The OurTurn group formed in 2017 after students at Carleton University expressed dissatisfaction with the sexual violence policy established by school administration at the end of 2016.
“It’s interesting,” she said, “because the OurTurn action plan came out a week after the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke. It wasn’t planned, but I genuinely experienced what it feels like to shift in the #MeToo movement.”
“So, before the #MeToo movement, I was doing a lot of the work at Carleton University with other folks, and it was so hard,” she said.
“I was having to deal with questions like ‘oh, rape culture doesn’t exist on campus’ or ‘oh, it’s not that bad,’ and then literally, when the [Harvey Weinstein] story broke, the week after the OurTurn action plan broke, and for the rest of the year, I never had to answer a question about ‘this doesn’t happen on campus’ or ‘rape culture doesn’t exist’ because suddenly there was this collective understanding of campuses—and everywhere—being unsafe for women, non-binary folks.” – Caitlin Salvino, former chair of OurTurn
However, Ally Crockford, public educator with the Ottawa Rape Crisis Centre (ORCC), said the spikes in sexual assault reports to the police after the #MeToo explosion shouldn’t overshadow the survivors still left in the dark.
“We are also aware that for some survivors, this can be an empowering moment, but for a lot of others, it can be something that leaves them feeling very raw and vulnerable, and it makes it more difficult to access them for support.
“Just as we see a lot of beautiful stories of sur vivors being supported by other folks around the world, we also do see a significant backlash, and that’s, again, something survivors are aware of. So, it can be a bit of a double-edged sword,” Crockford said, referring to cases where victims have been blamed for their assault.
She also noted survivors don’t come forward because the vast majority of them who come forward don’t see justice coming through the criminal justice system.
“When we see our numbers go up, that says to us that people feel more comfortable disclosing and reaching out for support, but it hasn’t necessarily always been something you see consistently.” – Ally Crockford, public educator with the Ottawa Rape Crisis Centre (ORCC)
“Even if you do take that step and decide to pursue a legal, criminal, or civil suit, it can sometimes be years of what can be very trying, focused on a horrifying experience—a very traumatizing experience that really brings up all of those feelings again and again,” Crockford said.
Similarly, Amina Doreh, public education co-ordinator at the Sexual Assault Support Centre of Ottawa, said one of the largest barriers to accessing survivors for support is their fear of invalidation.
“They’re afraid to speak about their experience because they’re afraid they won’t be believed,” she said.
Doreh also noted that sometimes sexual assault victims don’t come forward with their abuse because they don’t know if their experience would be categorized as sexual violence.
Other times, it’s because the perpetrator is someone they know closely, meaning if they made a report against them, it could lead to more violence.
Doreh said the way to overcome this is to provide people who come forward with the space to speak without asking too many questions.
“Focus on how they feel or felt, rather than focusing on the details of their experiences with sexual assault,” she said.
Help not hashtags
Doreh also pointed out the issue with the lack of support readily available after #MeToo went viral. She commended the increased marketing around the availability of resources for sexual assault victims but said there are still long waitlists for support lines and other like services because the supply hasn’t been able to meet the demand.
Another issue with the surge in marketing around the #MeToo movement, Crockford said, is that local sexual assault support centres like the ORCC find themselves always trying to ensure the #MeToo movement is representative of survivors themselves.
“#MeToo has done so much to raise awareness of the prevalence of sexual violence,” Crockford said, “but it has traditionally focused on very attractive younger celebrity women, traditionally cis women, traditionally white women.”
“So, one of things that we want to make sure is that the voices of survivors who are often left out of that narrative are still heard; ensuring that we are focusing on women of colour, trans and non-binary folks, folks with disability, who are disproportionately likely to experience sexual violence and are less likely to see themselves represented in movements like #MeToo.” – Ally Crockford
“What we see on Twitter isn’t always the same representation of who we see in the centres,” she said.
Crockford added that this creates an additional barrier for visible minorities to seek help from the police if not other support services.
“[These survivors] may be working during the normal hours that support services are open, so they aren’t able to physically be at those services when they’re open, or they may feel that the systems aren’t there for them,” she said.
“In particular, we know that survivors of colour, Indigenous survivors, often have very difficult experiences with medical institutions or police services, and so, seeking help from those institutions can be daunting and something that people don’t feel comfortable doing,” she added.
Then, there is the issue with institutions capitalizing on the movement, using language in support of #MeToo, but neglecting to implement real action that would protect survivors.
Salvino cautioned against this kind of performative support.
“I’ve also seen co-opting of language, so institutions saying that they care about survivors, using progressive language; governments doing the same, and I think that’s something that we kind of have to be careful with.
“That’s kind of what the OurTurn report was—everyone saying their policies are great and they love their survivors and they want to help them, but when they look at the stuff, it’s just not the reality, and that’s kind of where the work is going now, you know, continuously looking past this performative support of survivors and looking at what substantially needs to happen,” she said.
Support a strong future
Salvino also said the reason why the #MeToo movement blew up is because of all the support work that has been done prior to Milano’s tweet.
“I think with the #MeToo movement, how I feel is that the only reason a #MeToo movement happened was because folks like myself, or like everyone else who was working on it for 20 years before me, continuously put in that work when it wasn’t trendy,” she said.
Likewise, Doreh said support centres, like the Sexual Assault Support Centre of Ottawa, are the “after-effect” of the #MeToo movement.
“We’ve been around for 35 years and invested a lot of grounds in the anti-sexual violence against women movement,” Doreh said. “When it’s all died down, we will still be here.”
Graphics by Paloma Callo
