The hashtags #MeToo and #Timesup have been all over social media for the few past months, but what exactly do they mean?
The #MeToo movement was originally started by social activist Tarana Burke back in 2006, when she posted about it in MySpace. She did it to help women who had been through sexual harassment or sexual assault. On Oct. 15, 2017, actress Alyssa Milano brought the hashtag back with the following tweet:
She tweeted it to raise awareness about how often sexual harassment and sexual assault happen. The movement gave those who had been quiet for too long a voice, and it also let people know that they were not alone. It spread all over social media and all over the world. On Dec. 6, 2017, TIME magazine nominated the “silence breakers,” those who helped start or spread the movement, Person of the Year.
A lot of women took the #MeToo movement into the streets, during the Women’s March in January of 2018. To this day, people still talk about this, showing how sexual abuse is something that we need to take care off and tackle once and for all. If you would like more information about this hashtag or want to donate money to help the survivors of sexual harassment and sexual assault, visit here.
The #TimesUp movement is a movement against sexual harassment and it was started earlier this year. It was inspired by the #MeToo movement and by all the sexual assault allegations towards Harvey Weinstein. In November 2017, a letter from the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, was published in TIME. The letter talked about the experiences of sexual harassment among the women in their workplace, and they said it was signed by 700,000 of them. Then, the following open letter was posted on the New York Times on Jan.1,2018.
The letter talks about how the women were sexually harassed in their workplace. One of the biggest missions of this movement was to raise money to get legal defense funding to those low-income women that wanted to get justice for being sexually harassed. Another mission was to get celebrities to speak about it and wear black during the 75th Golden Globe Awards.
Many actresses did, in fact, support the movement and wore black to the Golden Globes, and Oprah gave a speech on the movement as well. Since the movement launched, it has raised over $20 million, and the amount keeps growing. If you would like to donate money, visit here.
More and more people are talking about sexual abuse and more and more people are standing up to it.