The killing of Özgecan Aslan (20) after sexual assault has raised an awareness for both women and men: “confession revolution” and therapy among the former, and “shame” among the latter.
The twitter tag #sendeanlat [you speak up as well] attracted over 500,000 tweets in 2 days where women across Turkey shared their experiences with sexual harassment. Even 48 hours after the opening of the tag, one third of the tweets were original which means that even we exclude retweets, hundreds of thousands of women shared their harassment experience and men expressed their support to the victims.
I interviewed İdil Elveriş, academician at Bilgi University, on why she started the tag #sendeanlat on February 14 and how she interpreted its being viral.
Why did you start the tag?
The usage of social media has a purpose. There are sometimes cases where you can’t normally have the same impact with classical social media. Creating awareness is one of these.
In a way, #sendeanlat was a way to let these people speak up. It was an invitation.
The killing of Özgecan per se created an outrage. It became a huge reaction combined with the [government’s] recently intensifying interventions on women’s lives and bodies.
How do you comment on the tweet being viral?
If this tag was shared a month ago, perhaps it wouldn’t create the same affect. This was a little bit about timing. It was also a very personal matter, sexual harassment is such a probable case. In Turkey, sexual harassment and violence against women is so common, therefore I believe that everybody has something to say about this.
According to you, who should better be reading this tag?
For me, it doesn’t matter men or women. Even though I didn’t start this to make men feel ashamed and for women to “get their stories out”, share and have solidarity, social media has this aspect: This has turned into awareness for men after they started to express their support.
This would only make me happy, because I don’t believe that the women struggle could only be won with women. Men must be alongside with women as well. And such is the case and such is how it is supposed to be. I believe their support is very important.
Moreover, whatever has been shared under this tag also helped us create a digital archive. We have drawn a map on how violence and harassment towards women in Turkey is widespread. This is very important for facing. This is even beyond my expectations.
How do you think this is contributing to a solution?
I am not an expert on social politics. However, one of the most important factors is visibility here.
Some said it was a “collective therapy”, it is important that women are able to talk about their experiences and feel that they are not alone. The victim must be able to express its victimhood. On the other hand, those who harass should not solely be labeled as “perverts”, but ordinary men who have daughters.
This will continue step by step. First we see things, then we try to understand it. In order to create a solution, we need to have a diagnosis. First of all, we need to face the fact that we have a harassment problem here.
We don’t have quick solutions here. That would be too easy. But we can find a solution departing from discussions where men are included. Whatever I did could only help to show how common it is. Only after this, we can have a struggle against it. (EKS/HK/BM)
* Click here to read the unabridged interview in Turkish.