"MeToo"

Tarana Burke, the civil rights activist, worked with marginalised women in neglected American communities. She met shocking numbers of women who have been victims of sexual violence.

Tarana Burke is the civil right activist who coined the phrase "Me Too". 

She told BBC World Service's programme HARDtalk about how the Me Too movement continues to speak up for voiceless girls and women.

She declared "The beauty, I think, and the magic of MeToo is that it's a unifer in that way, and it's where survivors find community and so....definitely the mainstream media kept the focus on the actresses and Hollywood and that...but at its core the women who came forward were really no different than those girls who I served in the communities ten years before."

Tarana calls the women who were abused "survivors"! She doesn't call them victims! She prefers the term survivors because these abused women were able to carry on with their life successfully, despite the horrible experiences that still affect their everyday life.

The MeToo movement went viral because several famous movie actresses offered to give information about sexual harassment.

Indeed "MeToo" spread quickly and widely on the internet through social media.

When terrible allegations against Harry Weinstein made headlines in 2017, the MeToo hashtag became the focus for a global movement of determined women who were ready to tell their own stories about abusive sexual behaviour.

Let's not forget that most survivors of sexual violence are ordinary women, living ordinary lives, and they don't have anyone to help them. For many women, bringing a sexual harassment lawsuit is prohibitively expensive.

But let's hope that the MeToo movement has opened up a space to talk about sexual violence in a new way on social medias.

Women need to break up social structures like privilege. Indeed it's male-dominated social structures like privilege that need to be stopped. 

The problem won't disappear overnight! 

The MeToo movement has helped motivate women around the world to solve sexual harrassment, assault, and misconduct and it has helped women to work together to expose them on social medias!

The movement gained attention because MeToo entered its most public phase! 

More and more survivors spoke out and they learned that they were not ALONE!