It was April last year,
and I was on an evening out with friends to celebrate one of their birthdays.
We hadn't been all together for a couple of weeks
and it was a perfect evening as we were all reunited.
At the end of the evening,
I caught the last underground train back to the other side of London.
The journey was smooth.
I got back to my local station
and I began the 10-minute walk home.
As I turned the corner onto my street,
my house in sight up ahead,
I heard footsteps behind me
that seemed to have approached out of nowhere
and were picking up pace.
Before I had time to process what was happening,
a hand was clapped around my mouth so that I could not breathe
and the young man behind me dragged me to the ground,
beat my head repeatedly against the pavement
until my face began to bleed,
kicking me in the back and neck
while he began to assault me,
ripping off my clothes
and telling me to "shut up" as I struggled to cry for help.
With each smack of my head to the concrete ground,
a question echoed through my mind that still haunts me today.
"Is this going to be how it all ends?"
[Little could] I have realized that I'd been followed the whole way
from the moment that I left the station.
And hours later,
I was standing topless and barelegged in front of the police,
having the cuts and bruises on my naked body photographed
for forensic evidence.
Now there are few words to describe the all-consuming feelings
of vulnerability, shame, upset and injustice that I was ridden with
in that moment and for the weeks to come.
But wanting to find a way to condense these feelings
into something ordered that I could work through,
I decided to do what felt most natural to me.
I wrote about it.
It started out as a cathartic exercise.
I wrote a letter to my assaulter,
humanizing him as "you,"
to identify him as part of the very community
that he had so violently abused that night.
Stressing the tidal wave effect of his actions,
I wrote,
"Did you ever think of the people in your life?
I don't know who the people in your life are.
I don't know anything about you.
But I do know this:
you did not just attack me that night.
I'm a daughter, I'm a friend,
I'm a sister, I'm a pupil,
I'm a cousin, I'm a niece,
I'm a neighbor,
I'm the employee who served everyone coffee
in the café under the railway.
And all the people who form these relations to me
make up my community,
and you assaulted every single one of them.
You violated the truth that I will never cease to fight for,
and which all of these people represent --
that there are infinitely more good people in the world than bad."
But determined not to let this one incident make me lose faith
in the solidarity in my community or humanity as a whole,
I recalled the 7/7 terrorist bombings in July 2005 on London transport,
and how the mayor of London at the time,
and indeed my own parents,
had insisted that we all get back on the tubes the next day,
so that we wouldn't be defined or changed by those that had made us feel unsafe.
I told my attacker,
"You've carried out your attack,
but now I'm getting back on my tube.
My community will not feel we are unsafe walking home after dark.
We will get on the last tubes home,
and we will walk up our streets alone,
because we will not ingrain or submit to the idea
that we are putting ourselves in danger in doing so.
We will continue to come together,
like an army,
when any member of our community is threatened,
and this is a fight you will not win."
At the time of writing this letter --
(Applause)
Thank you.
At the time of writing this letter,
I was studying for my exams in Oxford,
and I was working on the local student paper there.
And despite being lucking enough
to have friends and family supporting me,
it was a pretty isolating time.
I didn't know anyone
who'd been through something like this before,
at least I didn't think I did.
I'd read the news reports, the statistics,
and I knew how common sexual assault was
and yet I couldn't actually name a single person
that I'd heard speak out about an experience of this kind before.
So in a somewhat spontaneous decision,
I decided that I would publish my letter in the student paper,
hoping to reach out to others in Oxford
that might have had a similar experience
and be feeling the same way.
At the end of the letter,
I asked others to write in with their experiences
under the hashtag, #notguilty
to emphasize that survivors of assault could express themselves
without feeling shame or guilt about what happened to them --
to show that we could all stand up to sexual assault.
What I never anticipated
is that almost overnight,
this published letter would go viral.
Soon we were receiving hundreds of stories from men and women
across the world,
which we began to publish on a website I set up,
and the hashtag became a campaign.
There was an Australian mother in her 40s who described how on an evening out,
she was followed to the bathroom
by a man who went to repeatedly grab her crotch.
There was a man in the Netherlands
who described how he was date raped on a visit to London
and wasn't taken seriously by anyone he reported his case to.
I had personal Facebook messages from people in India and South America
saying how can we bring the message of the campaign over there.
One the first contributions we had was from a woman called [Nikki],
who described growing up being molested my her own father.
And I had friends open up to me
about experiences ranging from those that happened last week
to those that happened years ago that I'd had no idea about.
And the more that we started to receive these messages,
the more we also started to receive messages of hope.
People feeling empowered by this community of voices
standing up to sexual assault and victim-blaming.
One woman called Olivia,
after describing how she was attacked by someone she had trusted
and cared about for a long time,
said, "I've read many of the stories posted on here,
and I feel more hopeful that if so many women can move forward,
then I can, too.
I've been inspired by many
and I hope I can be as strong as them someday,
and I'm sure I will."
People around the world began tweeting under this hashtag
and the letter was republished and covered by the national press,
as well as being translated into several other languages worldwide.
But something struck me
about the media attention that this letter was attracting.
For something to be front-page news,
given the word "news" itself,
we can assume it must be something new or something surprising.
And yet sexual assault is not something new.
Sexual assault,
along with other kinds of injustices,
is reported in the media all the time.
But through the campaign,
these injustices were framed as not just news stories,
they were first-hand experiences that had effected real people,
who were creating,
with the solidarity of others,
what they needed and had previously lacked:
a platform to speak out,
the reassurance they weren't alone or to blame for what happened to them,
and open discussions that would help to reduce stigma around the issue.
The voices of those directly effected were at the forefront of the story,
not the voices of journalists or commentators on social media,
and that's why the story was news.
We live in an incredibly interconnected world
with the proliferation of social media,
which is of course a fantastic resource for igniting social change.
But it's also made us increasingly reactive,
from the smallest annoyances of, "Oh my train's been delayed,"
to the greatest injustices of war, genocides, terrorist attacks.
Our default response has become to leap to react to any kind of grievance
by tweeting, Facebooking, hastagging --
anything to show others that we too have reacted.
The problem with reacting in this manner on mass
is it can sometimes mean that we don't actually react at all --
not in the sense of actually doing anything, anyway.
It might make ourselves feel better,
feeling like we've contributed to a group mourning or outrage,
but it doesn't actually change anything.
And what's more,
it can sometimes drown out the voices
of those directly effected by the injustice,
whose needs must be heard.
Worrying too,
is the tendency for some reactions to injustice
to build even more walls,
being quick to point fingers
with the hope of providing easy solutions to complex problems.
One British tabloid,
on the publication of my letter,
branded a headline stating,
"Oxford Student Launches Online Campaign to Shame Attacker."
But the campaign never meant to shame anyone.
It meant to let people speak and to make others listen.
Divisive Twitter trolls were quick to create even more injustice,
commenting on my attacker's ethnicity or class
to push their own prejudiced agendas.
And some even accused me of feigning the whole thing
to push, and I quote, "my feminist agenda of man-hating."
I know, right?
As if I'm going to be like,
"Hey guys! Sorry I can't make it,
I'm really busy trying to hate the entire male population by the time I'm 30."
(Laughter)
Now, I'm almost sure that these people wouldn't say the things the say in person,
but it's as if because they might be behind a screen,
in the comfort in their own home when on social media,
that people forget that what they're doing is a public act --
that other people will be reading it and be effected by it.
Returning to my analogy of getting back on our trains,
another main concern that I have
about this noise that escalates from our online responses to injustice
is that it can very easily slip into portraying us as the affected party,
which can lead to a sense of defeatism,
a kind of mental barrier to seeing and opportunity for positivity or change
after a negative situation.
A couple of months before the campaign started,
or any of this happened to me,
I went to a TEDx event in Oxford
and I saw Zelda la Grange speak,
the former private secretary to Nelson Mandela.
One of the stories she told really stuck me.
She spoke of when Mandela was taken to court
by the South African Rugby Union
after he commissioned an inquiry into sports affairs.
In the court room,
he went up to the South African Rugby Union's lawyers,
shook them by the hand
and conversed with them each in their own language.
And Zelda wanted to protest,
saying they had no right to his respect
after this injustice that they had caused him.
He turned to her and said,
"You must never allow the enemy to determine the grounds for battle."
And at the time of hearing these words
I didn't really know why they were so important,
but I felt though they were
and I wrote them down in a notebook that I had on me at the time.
But I've thought about this line a lot ever since.
Revenge,
or the expression of hatred towards those who have done us injustice
may feel like a human instinct in the face of wrong,
but we need to break out of these cycles
if we are to hope to transform negative events of injustice
into positive social change.
To do otherwise
continues to let the enemy determine the grounds for battle,
creates a binary
where we who have suffered become the affected,
pitted against them --
the perpetrators.
And just like we got back on our tubes,
we can't let our platforms for interconnectivity and community
be the places that we settle for defeat.
But I don't want to discourage a social media response,
because I owe the development of the #notguilty campaign
almost entirely to social media.
But I do want to encourage a more considered approach
to the way we use it to respond to injustice.
And the start I think is to ask ourselves two things.
Firstly,
why do I feel this injustice?
In my case there were several answers to this.
Someone had hurt me and those who I loved
under the assumption that they wouldn't have to be held to account
or recognize the damage they had caused.
Not only that,
but thousands of men and women suffer every day from sexual abuse,
often in silence,
and yet it's still a problem
that we don't give the same airtime to as other issues --
still an issue many people blame victims for.
So next ask yourself how,
in recognizing these reasons,
could I go about reversing them?
With us, this was holding my attacker to account --
and many others.
It was calling them out on the effect that they had caused.
It was giving airtime to the issue of sexual assault,
opening up discussions amongst friends, amongst families, in the media
that had been closed for too long,
and stressing that victims shouldn't feel to blame for what happened to them.
You might still have a long way to go in solving this problem entirely,
but in this way,
we can begin to use social media as an active tool for social justice,
as a tool to educate,
to stimulate dialogues,
to make those in positions of authority aware of an issue
by listening to those directly effected by it.
Because sometimes these questions don't have easy answers.
In fact they rarely do.
But this doesn't mean we still can't give them a considered response.
In situations where you can't go about thinking
how you'd reverse this feeling of injustice,
you can still think maybe not what you can do
but what you can not do.
You can not build further walls by fighting injustice with more prejudice,
more hatred.
You can not speak over those directly effected by an injustice.
And you can not react to injustice only to forget about it the next day
just because the rest of Twitter has moved on.
Sometimes not reacting instantly is, ironically,
the best immediate course of action we can take.
Because we might be angry, upset and energized by injustice,
but let's consider our responses.
Let us hold people to account
without descending into a culture
that thrives off shaming and injustice ourselves.
Let us remember that distinction,
so often forgotten by Internet users,
between criticism and insult.
Let us not forget to think before we speak
just because we might have a screen in front of us.
And when we create noise on social media,
let it not drown out the needs of those effected,
but instead let it amplify their voices,
so the Internet becomes a place where you're not the exception
if you speak out about something that has actually happened to you.
All these considered approaches to injustice
evoke the very keystones on which the Internet was built:
to network,
to have have signal,
to connect --
all these terms that imply bringing people together,
not pushing people apart.
Because if you look up the word "justice" in the dictionary,
before punishment,
before administration of law or judicial authority,
you get, "The maintenance of what is right."
And I think there are a few things more "right" in this world
than bringing people together,
than unions.
And if we allow social media to deliver that,
then it can deliver a very powerful form of justice, indeed.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)