Actress Alyssa Milano tweeted Oct. 15, 2017, “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.”
In the year since Milano’s tweet, “#MeToo” has been used roughly 19 million times on Twitter, according to the Pew Research Center. The #MeToo movement brought issues surrounding sexual assault and harassment into the highest echelons of power and in small communities. At IU, student group leaders said it created an outpour of support.
“It kind of created a social movement, in a sense, of working to support people who have been a victim of sexual misconduct,” said senior Ryan Arick, co-director of the sexual well-being committee for Culture of Care.
Arick said the sexual well-being committee saw an increased number of people interested in joining their committee at this year’s call-out meeting.
“Many people talked about the reason why they were interested was because that they wanted to make a difference and to change things, to support survivors of sexual assault and sexual misconduct,” Arick said.
Adina Romaner is the co-director of Safe Sisters, a group of women from Panhellenic Association sororities who are trained by IU Health Center’s Sexual Assault Crisis Service to help sexual assault survivors.
She said the group saw a surge of people interested in joining and seeking help from Safe Sisters in the wake of the #MeToo movement.
“It’s made it easier to be publicly aware and openly care about this issue,” Romaner said.
She said the number of influential figures who came forward with their own stories of sexual misconduct helped inspire other survivors to tell their own.
“The #MeToo movement gave awareness a face,” Romaner said. "It gave people somebody to look up to."
Zoe Peterson is the Sexual Assault Research Initiative director for the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction. She said since the #MeToo movement began, more people have become interested in research around sexual assault and harassment.
“What I’m doing isn’t changing that much, but I think the level of interest is changing,” Peterson said.
She said survivors sharing their stories helped people understand the prevalence of sexual misconduct better than statistics.
“I think in many ways it was much more impactful, and I think it’s made people much more aware of how prevalent the problem is,” Peterson said.
But those stories can be the source of the movement’s biggest criticisms. Arick said there is a counter movement on and off campus that casts doubt on survivors’ stories if they cannot account every detail of their assault.
“I think it’s going to really, really tear apart survivors,” Arick said.
Peterson said a backlash against the #MeToo movement can be concerning, but that doesn’t mean that the movement won’t create change. She said many feminist movements throughout history have faced similar adverse reactions.
“Even though there may be some backlash, there’s still progress,” Peterson said.
