#MeToo campaign targets sex assault
Ordinary women share their stories of harassment
LONDON — The wave of revelations and revulsion over Harvey Weinstein has gone global.
As A-list actresses level claims of sexual misconduct at the nowdisgraced Hollywood mogul, ordinary women everywhere engaged in a collective outpouring of their stories of assaults and sexual harassment, inspired by an online campaign made famous by Alyssa Milano.
And, as the #MeToo ranks swelled, there is also a sense of bitterness about how sexism remains rooted in many parts of the world — including places seen as progressive regarding women’s rights.
“This has been part of our world — women’s world — since time immemorial,” said the British actress Emma Thompson when asked by the BBC about the Weinstein scandal.
Indeed, the statistics compiled by the Stop Street Harassment campaign in the United States make for sober reading.
The group highlights a 2014 study by YouGov that ranked the safety of transit systems for women in 16 cities around the world. Bogota was the most unsafe city in the survey, while Mexico City was the worst for verbal and physical harassment, with 64 percent of women respondents saying they had been groped or harassed on public transit.
Within hours of Milano’s #MeToo call, the hashtag was trending worldwide, with accounts pouring in from Calgary to Cairo and from Paris to Perth. The two-word hashtag has been tweeted more than half a million times and has been featured in over 12 million posts on Facebook. On Arab social media sites, women jumped into the conversation using the hashtag #AnaKaman, the Arabic translation of “me too.”
A 63-year-old Australian woman tweeted that harassment was present “all through my early working life in the 70s & 80s” while working at the Department of Defense in Sydney.
“Looking back it was horrendous,” she wrote.
A parish priest in rural England tweeted where she faced harassment: “Paris when I was 16 heading to visit my pen friend. Norfolk when I was 22 being expected to ‘earn’ some bar work. Others I can’t say.”
“In Calgary traveling with a client on business . . . In Vancouver applying for one job, working at another . . . Amazingly #JustHowItWas #MeToo,” tweeted a Canadian author with her list.
A self-described German-Finnish world traveler tweeted: “And then there was that old man who placed his sweaty hands on me in an overfilled metro in Rome acting as if it’s not him.”