The Only Alternative?: Giving Testimonies of Sexual Violence on Social Media

• In Event: Storytelling and Erasure Among Marginalized Populations

Abstract

Even before the #MeToo movement, social media was an important instrument for survivors of sexual violence – whether to name the perpetrator or to share their side of the story. My paper explores narratives of six women survivors from India who wrote about their experience of violence on social media. Through primary data derived from in-depth interviews, I report on their motivations and expectations behind writing on social media, how they contributed to the creation of digital feminist networks of solidarity, the underexamined aspect of labor associated with writing on social media, as well as the kind of responses they received. The aim of this paper is to extend our understanding of writing social media testimonies in the absence of effective legal redressal mechanisms and how the experience becomes an integral part of the survivor's story as they attempt to cope with the violence they have faced.

Author

• Sukanya Bhattacharya, University of Tennessee, Knoxville