Women Are Rallying Under #NotOkay to Share Their Stories of Sexual Assault Following Trump Tape Leak

News About Inspiring Women

October 9, 2016 9:07 pm

After a leaked video of Donald Trump making repellant comments about women hit the Internet (and promptly scattered the Republican Party) on Friday, Canadian writer Kelly Oxford tweeted about her own sexual assault in response—and encouraged other women to do the same. Thousands of responses poured in during the first hours the rallying hashtag, #NotOkay, was established, and they've kept coming since.

Trump's leaked 2005 tape contained disturbing comments the presidential candidate made about women. He was recorded saying that he could "grab women by the p---y" because he was famous and that he could kiss women without invitation or consent—an action he attributed to a lack of self-control. Oxford's response to his comments—and to sexual assault in general—is to make the women affected by the crime visible rather than just a number in a set of statistics. "They aren't just stats," she tweeted in her first post, where she also shared her first five stories of sexual assault.

As more responses came in, she stood in solidarity with those who also shared their story: "Not our shame," she wrote.

Fourteen hours after Oxford sent her initial tweet, stories still kept coming—a minimum of 50 per minute, she posted.

Fifty. Per. Minute.

In tweeting their stories to Oxford, women are challenging the long-held and harmful idea that women are somehow responsible for their assault.

In the tapes, Trump talked about his own lack of self-control as if it wasn't a deeply rooted personal issue but a boast: "You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them," he says about women. "It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait."

But in breaking their silence—some likely for the first time—the women rallying around #NotOkay are destroying these harmful misconceptions. By early Saturday morning, the hashtag was trending. Oxford "liked" each tweet, collecting them all in one gut-wrenching space.

Sickeningly, for many women, their first sexual assault took place when they were minors.

On Saturday afternoon, Oxford shared a screenshot of her Twitter engagement numbers. At the time of posting, she'd had more than 9.7 million impressions.

Overnight and through Sunday, consistently more than 1,000 tweets per hour were posted with the hashtag.

And by Sunday evening, Oxford had this to say:

Props to Oxford for getting a conversation underway that we desperately need to have—and to the thousands of women who stepped forward with their stories.

Source: http://www.glamour.com/story/women-are-rallying-under-hashtag-to-share-their-stories-of-sexual-assault