As #MeToo continues to find its way onto the social media accounts of women and men around the world, this hashtag is finding its power in the magnitude and frequency at which it is being shared.
Morgan Allen, a senior psychology major from Lubbock and a member of Tech’s Women’s Leadership Institute, said the hashtag’s greatest impact is how it highlights the scale of the issue of sexual violence.
“Whenever a woman or man says #MeToo, it’s probably happened more than once. I know as a woman, since I’ve hit puberty, I’ve been dealing with sexual harassment,” Allen said. “This is something that I deal with every day: trying to avoid it or dealing with it when it happens.”
However, Allen said the movement fails to assign any blame to the perpetrators. Therefore, it is not helping the world move toward a less victim-focused conversation regarding sexual violence.
“There’s a little bit of controversy in the fact that it’s, once again, putting the burden of solving this problem of sexual assault and sexual harassment on the victims who are mostly women,” Allen said. “So, it’s a little frustrating because it’s asking women, ‘What are you going to do to help prevent this?’ But it’s also good because it’s really — in my opinion — getting the attention of the bystander.”
By focusing on engaging the bystander and equipping bystanders with the necessary skills to help in potentially dangerous situations, Allen said the movement brings the role of the bystander to the forefront of collective dialogue regarding sexual violence.
This is especially important because sometimes the people one expects to watch out for them can fail them, she said.
“I know because this has happened to me,” Allen said. “I got groped at a party, and I turned to this person who groped me because I was little upset. And my friend that I had brought with me pulled me aside and said, ‘No, Morgan. Don’t worry about it. It’s not a big deal. It’s just something that’s going to happen.’”
Situations like this are why Allen, along with countless other social media users, have decided to use tag their posts or photos with #MeToo. She said the movement spotlights those who live their lives afraid because of the threat of sexual violence.
“The #MeToo is not just talking about one instance or one experience or the day their life changed,” Allen said. “They’re talking about the way they have to live their life and the way they walk around and experience the world.”
Annika Conrick, a senior history major from Fort Worth and president of Tech’s Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance, said the movement helps to put faces and numbers to the conversations the society is having about sexual violence.
“When I got on social media (the day the #MeToo movement started),” Conrick said, “I saw post after post of high school friends, high school teachers, all of the mix, with #MeToo. And I was like, ‘Wow. So many different women have experienced this.’ It was like almost every woman I know was on social media putting the #MeToo.”
As the president of FMLA, Conrick said her organization has frequent conversations about issues like sexual violence.
FMLA also hosts an event called Take Back the Night, which provides a safe space for victims of sexual violence to get support and share their powerful stories, she said.
“As Texas Tech, we’re very supportive of survivors,” Conrick said. “We have these support groups for survivors. The administration is very good about being like, ‘OK, you have been sexually assaulted. Here are your resources. Here’s what we can do to help you.’ But, I would say where we lack is in the preventative side of it.”
Regarding Tech’s policy to have students complete Think About It, Conrick said those programs are only supplemented by the work done by the Risk Intervention & Safety Education office.
While RISE does good work to help change the way the Tech campus handles cases of sexual violence, Conrick said she wishes Tech did more to prevent sexual assault.
“We always imply that fraternities are filled with rapists. But, statistically, they can’t all be rapists. There’s about one or two in each fraternity,” she said. “So, the problem is that whole group of men (in the fraternity) often allow those one or two guys to do it without saying anything.”
This emphasizes the power of having well-trained bystanders, who feel confident in their ability to intervene, Conrick said.
It is better for sexual violence to be prevented, she said, than to simply wait for it to occur before stepping in.
“Rather than having to clean it up, why don’t we just fix the problem before (it becomes a problem)?” Conrick said.
So, she said she believes RISE’s bystander intervention training called Raiders Respond is one of the most effective ways on Tech campus to equip students with the skills they need to act preventatively.
Celeste Medina, a senior human development and family studies major from San Antonio, is a part of a research team called Gender Scenes that works to discover how people feel toward talking about sexual violence on college campuses.
“There’s this uncomfortable feeling around sexual assault,” Medina said. “I know that even when talking with friends, they describe to me an experience that they’ve had, and I’m like, ‘That’s questionable. Are you sure you don’t feel assaulted?’ And they say, ‘Oh no, that doesn’t happen to me. That would never happen to me. I’m better than that.’”
She said the society has been cultivated to be a “culture of silence.”
Currently, the societal norm is one where people do not speak openly about problems that make them seem broken or imperfect, Medina said. However, by pushing against this norm, the culture can abandon its propensity to encourage silence, regardless of how uncomfortable that process would be.
“That discomfort is what’s challenging people to think differently,” she said. “It’s going to put you in a weird place, but you can’t move towards comfort without being uncomfortable. And that comfort zone can really be damaging. That’s where you start to see people not speaking up because they feel guilt or they feel shame. They want to stay in a perfect, ideal way in society’s eyes.”
Therefore, Medina said, it is so powerful to search #MeToo on social media and see how many people have already begun to change the norm.
She said because this movement is taking place on social media, it is spreading widely through younger generations, and this makes it even more impactful.
“The fact that we have a platform like social media to do that with is something new to this generation, and so that’s why I think it’s so eye catching,” Medina said. “(It is) because we’re really reaching another dimension and another generation.”