How we talk about sexual assault online

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)