On October 16, 2017, celebrity and charmed actress Alyessa Milano shared a tweet requesting women who had suffered from sexual abuse to reply back with me too hash tag so that the exact magnitude of this issue could be understood. This was in reaction to sexual abuse allegations levied on Harvey Weinstein by a famous model. Milano’s tweet quickly became viral and received more than 37,000 comments.
On Facebook and Twitter, many women replied back in affirmative and the hash tag became one of the top trends in social media the world over. All over the world famous personalities who had faced the trauma joined in the campaign. These included names like Lady Gaga, Anna Paquin and actress Evan Rachel Wood who claimed to have been raped by someone she did not even know.
Few days after the tweet Australian Journalist Benjamin Law requested men to join the wave of change. He asked them to tweet back the hash tag “#HowIWillChange” and show their support to all those women who have been assaulted at some point in their life. He also suggested some solutions of his own and asked men to join in.
Sure enough, the outrage spread the world over and men understood that an assault of a woman is their problem as well. Alyssa Milano who was initially surprised to see this trend retweeted the same at her twitter handle to show the kind of support that her initiative was getting. However, there are always exceptions to any new trend and some men were not willing to join in. Some of them even went to the extent of saying that since they were not the perpetrators they would not join in.
This invoked an angry reaction from Benjamin Law who said that by not understanding and accepting the scope of this problem men are actually being naïve about it. However, the majority of the men were very supportive and keen to help and find a solution to the menace at hand. Eventually, all of the men around accept and say they will raise a voice whenever they see a woman being targeted or sexually abused.
Initially started off in 2007 by the founder of the organization Just Be Inc. Tarana Burke me too campaign has got the popularity and mileage it deserved now. It is important for both men and women to come together and try and eradicate the problem from its roots itself. In almost half of the world, women refrain from coming out in the open due to the social stigma associated with it.
Not only that men also do not consider this is a priority and sometimes ignore such events when they are happening in front of them. The success which the Metoo campaign has got shows that people are willing to break out and address this matter. Even if we are not involved in the crime it is critical that we speak up and stop the crime from happening. Then only the world would be a better and safe place for our better halves. Without trying we cannot expect any changes in mentalities to happen.
