Everyone on this earth will meet a random person. Once you met that person, you guys started to exchange numbers, hanging out with each other, telling your deepest secrets. That’s normal right? When you start to get comfortable with each other, something bad is going to happen. Some situations didn’t happen badly for them, but others went through worse. Relationships are a good example. The abusers are hurting their spouses, controlling them, even killing them, too. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, almost 20 people per minute are physically abused by their partner, which equals more than ten million women and men. Also, from NCADV, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 9 men experience severe intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner contacts sexual violence, and/or intimate partner stalking with impacts such as injury, fearfulness, post-traumatic stress disorder, and so on.
The “MeTooMovement” is a great example. The Metoo Movement is a social movement for women that previously went through sexual harassment and/or abuse, and publicly tell their stories on social media. This movement is more than just a hashtag. This movement doesn’t have a website or a hotline. Some celebrities support this movement, such as Jenifer Lawrence, Gabrielle Union, Terry Crews, and so on. This movement has been used for several situations on celebrities: Bill Cosby, R Kelly, and others. There are positives and negatives about the movement. The positive thing is this movement can impact the public about how many women/men go through this situation. This movement is a rallying cry that will help victims to stop suffering from abuse in silence. The negative things about this movement are you can ruin someone’s reputation and people will harass you after you said your testimony. R Kelly is a good example. Since the victims came out, R Kelly was supposed to make music with other artists, but now celebrities denied him. Also, some of his fans or public relations team will accuse them of having false allegations and threaten them about how they will expose them if they continue to talk about it.
Some people, mostly women, are vulnerable when it comes down to defending themselves. While there are several domestic violence campaigns for women, there should be more. So how can we make more domestic violence campaigns known on social media? Survivors of assault or friends of the survivor(s) can raise awareness using social media, such as using certain hashtags. Examples of hashtags they can use are “#Ihavebeenabused,” “#Isurvived,” or “#Ineedhelp,” anything creative. They can also morale personal social media pages, raise donations, and post live seminars, the latter of which allows guest speakers and victims to testify their experiences. Once the co-founder(s) of this organization/movement finds that certain hashtag, they can make a website for people that have gone through sexual abuse and a hotline. Also, they can put the link to their website on their social media pages. Read more information on domestic violence cases.