When will we finally take sexual assault seriously?

Me too. In the wake of the rape, abuse and sexual assault allegations against Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein, American actor Alyssa Milano issued a call on social media: “If all women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too’ as a status, we might give everyone a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” Since then, women — and some men, as well — have flooded Twitter, Facebook and Instagram saying #MeToo.

I’d be surprised if I have any female friends without a few stories of being groped or grabbed — or worse — by boys and men, usually starting at around age 12. So, yeah, of course, me too. But in a world where a man who openly joked about grabbing women by the genitals is elected president of the United States, the prevalence of sexual assault against women is not breaking news. Why do we keep treating it as though it is?

I don’t mean to be flippant or dismissive. I certainly don’t mean to minimize the courage it takes for survivors to come forward publicly with allegations of sexual abuse. The #MeToo movement is just the latest to raise awareness and launch important conversations about gendered power relations and the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault as a cross-cultural phenomenon. But honestly, how many times are we going to do this before there is a broader public acknowledgement that this really does happen?

In 2014, journalist Antonia Zerbisias and former Montreal Gazette reporter Sue Montgomery created the Twitter hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported. The co-creators used it to tweet support for the women who alleged they were assaulted by former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi. The hashtag went viral worldwide as people took to social media to share their own experiences. Or remember #YesAllWomen? This trended on Twitter in 2014, after 22-year-old Elliot Rodger went on a shooting spree on Isla Vista, near the University of California Santa Barbara. He killed six people before committing suicide. In the weeks prior to the slaughter, Rodger uploaded a series of YouTube videos in which he announced his hatred of women he felt had rejected him throughout his life. Like #BeenRapedNeverReported, #YesAllWomen went viral as women went online to share their own experiences with misogyny and sexually based violence.

In Quebec, people were shocked when, in 2005, former child star Nathalie Simard came forward with her tale of sexual abuse at the hands of her former mentor Guy Cloutier, who she alleges first raped her when she was 11. In 2015, a report by RadioCanada’s investigative program Enquête told the story of multiple Indigenous women in the Quebec community of Val d’Or who had come forward with allegations of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of police.

As I’ve written about before, sexual assault is not only common, it is an under-reported crime. In her 2012 article Limits of a Criminal Justice Response: Trends in Police and Court Processing of Sexual Assault, University of Ottawa criminology professor Holly Johnson found that only three per cent of those charged by police with sexual-assault offences in Canada in 2007 were women, yet 86 per cent of those victimized were women and girls. She also notes that, according to Statistics Canada’s crime victimization survey, an estimated 460,000 Canadian women were victims of sexual assault in 2004. Only eight per cent went to the police to report the crime.

It doesn’t help that Twitter — which was once a liberating space for free speech, respectful debate and amplifying the voices of those who have traditionally been silenced — has devolved into a truly terrible place, particularly for women.

By all means, let’s keep these public conversations about the ubiquity of sexual assault going. I just wish it didn’t take a seemingly never-ending cycle of high-profile scandals and hashtags to force people to take it seriously.