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#fbrape - "Advertisers are starting to pull out. The campaign is working. Here's why I started it."
Trigger Warning.
Running the Everyday Sexism Project, I see hundreds of stories every single day which make me furious, sad, frustrated and horrified in equal measure. Some days there are over a thousand submitted. I receive graphic weekly messages about exactly how I should be killed or raped for daring to speak out about women’s rights. I hear from women and girls who have been raped, beaten and systematically abused.
I’m explaining all this, to make it clear just what it means when I say that the stream of content I’ve received from Facebook users of images and pages depicting and inciting graphic rape and domestic violence have left me shaken and fighting back the tears.
For those who might not have seen some of this content, and who have responded to our recent #FBrape campaign with the usual “don’t be so easily offended” or “learn to take a joke," let me be clear. We are talking about thousands of images of women bleeding, torn, bruised, battered, scarred, and sometimes even dead.
...
I would love nothing more than to leave this stuff behind and never look at it again. There is nothing enjoyable about it. It plays in my head at night. But leaving Facebook wouldn’t solve the problem.
It wouldn’t stop the huge spread of this plethora of content on the world’s most used social networking site. It wouldn’t stop jokes and images about rape popping up in the timelines of the children whose parents have written to us in horror. It wouldn’t stop the normalization of rape and domestic violence as "just for laughs" in our culture, where one in three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime, where in the UK a woman is raped every nine minutes and up to 3 million women experience violence every year.
It wouldn’t stop the message spreading, with every click and every one of these pictures, that rape is something to laugh about, domestic violence is a joke, and that our society doesn’t take it seriously. It wouldn’t stop perpetrators getting the message that this will be laughed off and excused, or victims receiving the impression that they will not be taken seriously if they report. And no, of course it is not as simple as suggesting that such content directly causes these crimes. But it is about a culture that normalizes them and jokes about them to such an extent that they start to be seen as more acceptable.
...
http://www.xojane.com/issues/laura-bates-fbrape
Running the Everyday Sexism Project, I see hundreds of stories every single day which make me furious, sad, frustrated and horrified in equal measure. Some days there are over a thousand submitted. I receive graphic weekly messages about exactly how I should be killed or raped for daring to speak out about women’s rights. I hear from women and girls who have been raped, beaten and systematically abused.
I’m explaining all this, to make it clear just what it means when I say that the stream of content I’ve received from Facebook users of images and pages depicting and inciting graphic rape and domestic violence have left me shaken and fighting back the tears.
For those who might not have seen some of this content, and who have responded to our recent #FBrape campaign with the usual “don’t be so easily offended” or “learn to take a joke," let me be clear. We are talking about thousands of images of women bleeding, torn, bruised, battered, scarred, and sometimes even dead.
...
I would love nothing more than to leave this stuff behind and never look at it again. There is nothing enjoyable about it. It plays in my head at night. But leaving Facebook wouldn’t solve the problem.
It wouldn’t stop the huge spread of this plethora of content on the world’s most used social networking site. It wouldn’t stop jokes and images about rape popping up in the timelines of the children whose parents have written to us in horror. It wouldn’t stop the normalization of rape and domestic violence as "just for laughs" in our culture, where one in three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime, where in the UK a woman is raped every nine minutes and up to 3 million women experience violence every year.
It wouldn’t stop the message spreading, with every click and every one of these pictures, that rape is something to laugh about, domestic violence is a joke, and that our society doesn’t take it seriously. It wouldn’t stop perpetrators getting the message that this will be laughed off and excused, or victims receiving the impression that they will not be taken seriously if they report. And no, of course it is not as simple as suggesting that such content directly causes these crimes. But it is about a culture that normalizes them and jokes about them to such an extent that they start to be seen as more acceptable.
...
http://www.xojane.com/issues/laura-bates-fbrape
4 replies
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