LIBERATE

The #Metoo Reckoning
In a period of about 6 months we have witnessed numerous women come forward
to publicly document their trauma and expose the abusers who have violated them.
What began as Tarana Burke’s call for “mass healing” amongst sexual assault survivors
almost 10 years ago has turned into a global reckoning with the pervasiveness
of gender violence and societal complicity. We have been forced to contend with
how rape culture penetrates both public andprivate life in ways that morph even our
most intimate memories of family and childhood into painful reminders of the power
structures that govern our quotidian existence. The #metoo movement has shown
us that sexual abuse and rape are not faceless crimes with countless numbers of
statistical victims. It has taught us that sexual abuse and rape DO have perpetrators
who exist in the forms of both abusers and those who make their abuse possible.
It names silences as violence - it implicates those who prefer to unsee abuse and
promote a politics of respectability.
Yet, even while the frequency with which these men’s abusive actions are being exposed
appears to be high, these public revelations do not at all account for a statistic
that documents 1 in 5 women as having been sexually violated in their lifetimes
– it does not even dent it. And so we must ask ourselves: who is being deliberately
silenced? Who are we rendering preferably
unheard?