The movement began back in 2006 and was started by Tarana Burke in 2007. In order to help the victims and prevent cases of sexual assault, certain things need to be changed. The movement went viral five years ago this Saturday.
A transcript of the video can be found here.
The founder of the #MeToo movement is named Tarana Burke.
Black and brown girls were included in the program that we were running that supported survivors of sexual violence. Supporting grown people, women, and men, and other survivors, as well as helping people to understand what community action looks like in the fight to end sexual violence has grown since then.
We started Just Be Inc because we wanted to help young women develop a sense of self- worth. We were different from self-esteem. Yes, right? Before you have a healthy self-esteem, you need to build a sense of self- worth.
There were a lot of girls who were talking about their experiences with sexual violence. They were talking about their experience. Sometimes they were unaware that it was sexual violence. Yes, right? They would let us know what was going on. I had a 7th- grade girl tell me that her boyfriend was 21 years old. I didn't think that was a relationship. It is a crime.
Within days, we put our website up. Back then, there wasn't a thing called viral. This would be close to that if there was. Within a week or so, we had many responses from women who said, "Thank you for doing this," or "How can we be involved?" We realized this is much larger than we thought.
I accept that I am a leader of this movement, but I am more of a worker than that.
It has helped me to scale up and expand the work that I have been doing. I have a bigger platform to speak about it, talk about it, and more resources to implement it.
It's basically about survivors supporting survivors. It is about community healing and community action. We can give people the resources to have access to healing if we set the stage. Policies and laws that support survivors are legitimate.
Rape kits across the country need to be tested in order to find out if the survivors can get justice. What policies are in place at the local school? People at work can look at your policy.
People who work on Capitol Hill have to go through a 90-day cooling off period before they can file a sexual harassment claim. Hopefully that will set a precedent for the country.
Many survivors don't want people to be fired. They just want their story to be told They would like to say it out loud and be held accountable.
We have to discuss what survivors need. The ones who have to define justice are us.
Community action is one part of it. It is our belief that you can organize to end sexual violence. People do it all the time. We need to elevate this discussion to a social justice issue because there are organizations and groups that do that.
We have a documentary that is going to be rolled out and new materials as well. We're not here to ground the conversation and give it some context if the phrase "Me Too" gets popular in this context. This work is going to be lost.
I panicked initially. There's millions of women sharing their experience with sexual violence, and there's no container to process this, so I had another layer of fear. They don't have anyone here to help them walk through disclosure. What do you do when you are accused of sexual harassment?
First of all, it's a big deal. It's very gratifying to have people invest in the idea that helped our community. It is hopeful that the world will change to a place where we can have open discussions about sexual violence and how it affects millions of people around the world.
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