Editor's Note: Julian Norman is from London, UK. When she is not working, baking or cycling, she blogs at London Feminist and can often be found tweeting as @londonfeminist.
"Saddest things about #ididnotreport: that so many men are shocked by its content. That so few women are." -- @ijilRHG
"Wie steht es in der Schweiz mit #ididnotreport? Wie viele Betroffene gibt es hier?" {What’s going in in Switzerland with #ididnotreport? How many victims are there here?} - @marleneken
"Le #ididnotreport sur Twitter, un sujet qui me touche personnellement, donc je voulais partager" http://bit.ly/GGz79X {The #ididnotreport on Twitter, a subject which touched me personally, so I wanted to share.} - @alyxseda
"Twitter rompió una vez más barreras #ididnotreport" {Twitter breaks down barriers once more #ididnotreport} - @Cristimateos
These are just a selection of the tweets on the #ididnotreport hashtag, which is still going strong more than a week after I started it. I can’t select just one. I can’t even find the most powerful. They’re all powerful, each one a human experience in 140 characters.
It arose after I blogged about the Mumsnet campaign "We Believe You," and linked the under-reporting of rape to the non-reporting of other assaults. The previous week, a piece had been published in the Guardian about street harassment of women, and the number one theme among the commenters was: We don't believe you.
Reading the comments on that article had annoyed me. Everyday harassment is something that women in the UK experience routinely, to the point where we barely register it. We certainly don't bother to report it – or at least, I don't, and my friends don't. Who were these people saying that they simply didn't believe it happened?
When I shared the blog post on Twitter, another user tweeted back to say, "In my whole life I've never reported it – breast grabbing, hand up my skirt, etc." In a spontaneous moment, I tweeted, "#ididnotreport the commuter who stroked my bottom on the central line" - an event from only the previous day. It was just one example that popped into my mind; I could have used a number from the last month or so. I invited others to share, using the hashtag. And so it was born – of nothing more than frustration at the levels of disbelief and a sadly large supply of material.
Where it's easy for commenters to dismiss one woman as a liar, it's less easy to dismiss thousands of accounts, and thousands there were – 500 in the first 24 hours, climbing to over three thousand. (Editor’s note: According to the social data company PeopleBrowsr, the hashtag was used 5,468 times on March 12. Since then, it has been has 22,018 Twitter mentions.)
I had imagined a few women joining in to share experiences of street harassment, but what I saw instead was an outpouring of accounts ranging from low-level harassment to vicious rapes, accounts from men, women, trans people, sex workers, young and old, around the world.
I started retweeting them, initially intending to retweet each one in order to show the magnitude of the issue, but after the first couple of hours I couldn't keep up with them. I was overwhelmed by the number of people sharing very personal experiences, the bravery of doing so publicly, and the anger in some of the tweets.
The blog I wrote the following day reflected my immediate reaction. It’s been over a week now, and since #ididnotreport began, I have had contact from women all over the world, including "Pas De Justice Pas De Paix," a French organization who coincidentally began a campaign at the same time, entitled "je n'ai pas porté plainte," which translates almost exactly as "I did not report." As you can see from the tweets above, people are using the hashtag in France, Spain, Switzerland and further afield (including in the USA).
I am still astonished that a moment of spontaneous frustration on Twitter has morphed into a global consciousness raising exercise. It's terribly sad that this sort of campaign is still needed, but the sheer volume of stories being shared shows that it is. I hope that, unwittingly though it began, this campaign will nudge social attitudes towards belief, and that those who experience assault will one day have sufficient support to be able to say: "I did report. And I was believed."
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