Why I said #MeToo: An Exploration of the Purpose of Disclosure Among Indian Women

Reaction Against Injustice to Women

The foremost of the reasons for making disclosures appeared to be a response to the continued injustice against women. The participants wished to oppose faulty popular beliefs, rooted in misogyny and attitudes, that attribute blame to survivors. There is a major affective component, involving anger over the misplaced responsibility for the abuse, which prompted their disclosure that emerged from dissent and frustration. Speaking about these issues, some of the participants noted the following:

Anna (21), college student:

…To recognize that isn’t something that happens to women who dressed a certain way or of a certain age, coz it happened to me when I was eleven or twelve so yeah.

Bina (32), social worker:

I would say it’s sort of built-up, there was a lot of accumulated anger and sadness and frustration that sort of, you know there were a series of events across the country, you know in India it would have been Nirbhaya, it would have been, perhaps like…. It was the march in Washington in the US. So there were a lot of things happening globally at a scale that had never happened before.

Philipose and Kesavan (2019) explained how disclosures can occur as a reaction to felt social injustice. This study similarly found that disclosures were reactionary in nature, in response to the sustained injustice against women.

Expression of Solidarity

The study found that participants chose to disclose, seeing disclosure as a sign of support and solidarity with all those who have suffered sexual abuse. They felt that they had to add their voice to the collective action, to signify to other survivors that they were not alone, and that sexual abuse is not an isolated occurrence, but a pervasive social phenomenon. They believe that this helps in creating a feeling of community. This underlines the participants’ internalisation of social responsibility. The participants conformed to the notion that if they could contribute to the welfare of anyone else in this manner, they were required to do it out of a sense of social responsibility. They believed that disclosing was warranted because of the realisation of the significance it held for helping others. This was their contribution to champion a cause that they felt needed societal redressal and mass mobilisation to change. The disclosures took on a greater meaning beyond the purpose it served at an individualistic level. The participants noted the following:

Shaama (25), gender rights activist:

for me, it was just about adding the voice, you know, like, I’ve seen what’s really beautiful about the MeToo movement is like that critical mass—maybe it started with just one woman and then it sort of just like snowballed into something. So, for me it was sort of…. I wanted to put my weight behind it more than to gain support from it.

Dharaa (27), classical dancer:

I just thought of it as fulfilling my responsibility and as the least that is expected of me for getting all this education and all this privilege in my life. I think for me it was just about putting my weight behind this movement and endorsing something I thought was important.

This conceptualisation of the participants’ role in contributing to the movement, fits with the theoretical notion of new social movements being centred around a collective identity, which explains how the movement is mobilised based on a shared identity among its participants (Peoples, 2019). It also aligns with the notion of solidarity as ‘a communal sense of obligation to support collective action’ (Heckscher & McCarthy, 2014).

Validation from Others

As noted by Chaudoir and Fisher (2010), the participants in this study too were motivated to disclose with the expectation of receiving validation for their experience of sexual abuse. They disclosed with the hope that they would gain a sense of affirmation of the seriousness of the issue they had addressed and that such support would validate their act of publicly disclosing their experience. This expectation indicates that they wanted others to recognise their trauma. Some participants noted the following:

Glenn (36), journalist:

Yeah, to some part, validation is obviously a big part of it right. Like I said … the fact that everyone else was putting it up was also validation, so, the fact that when I put it up, I expected people to, you know, support me in whatever way.

Bina (32), social worker:

I think I wanted to break that silence and I think I wanted my family to also know, because I tell my friends all kinds of things but I just don’t tell my family, so my mom, my aunt and uncle who are on Facebook. I think I just, you know, in a strange way, I wanted them to understand that they love me a lot and they want to protect me but there’s this one thing you can never protect me from.

The literature presents that responses to disclosures that validate the discloser’s experience of victimisation are viewed as favourable responses, as opposed to invalidating responses (Orchowski & Gidycz, 2015). This proposition can help place the findings of this study in perspective, where the purpose of disclosing is, at least in part, to receive validation.

Expectation of Closure

Seeking closure was a part of the participants’ agenda for disclosing. They saw the disclosure as instrumental in coming to terms with the abuse experienced. The disclosure involved presenting a personal narrative that they were previously conditioned to believe was unacceptable to express. However, they now decided that the disclosure could facilitate confronting past experiences, by explicitly addressing them and gaining resolution. Some participants noted the following:

Meera (45), homemaker:

On a deeper level, for me, it was confronting some incidents I had brushed off in the past and you know, I’d put them down to, you know, I guess that happens, everyone has a story; it’s not really that important, which I think, you know, I think as women, we are socialised into doing that.

Kala (40), software engineer:

I didn’t want to call this person out per se, that’s not why I did it. I did it because I was guilty for the longest time coz I know it wasn’t my fault but I think I finally just wanted to let go of the fact.

Smith (2005) noted that discussing one’s sexual victimisation and the associated effects has been viewed as capable of producing a sense of healing. Further, achieving closure has also been examined as contributing to sustained resilience and coping with negative emotions following traumatic incidents (Bogar & Hulse-Killacky, 2006).

Address Stigma

Normalising conversation on topics previously stigmatised in social discourse was another reason for disclosure. The sustained belief, that issues pertaining to sexual violence are taboo, was something that had to be countered and deposed. The participants realised that these issues warranted public attention and their disclosure was prompted by this need to make the articulation of such issues acceptable. They felt that lending their voice to the issue could transform thinking and reduce misconceptions. Some participants noted the following:

Anna (21), college student:

I think for me it was, this sense of ‘hey, its okay to finally talk about this’, that was basically what it was, that was the foundation of it.

Sara (28), manager:

It just became all the more necessary to like let people know that—it happens a lot more frequently than you think, it happens to people that you see all the time. Just letting people know the magnanimity of something that people don’t necessarily have to talk about and knowing that it’s okay to talk about.

The participants felt the need to raise awareness about the gravity of an issue that has long been ostracised. This emphasises the concern for macrocosmic issues like gender equality and social justice and an altruistic motivation to disclose. The literature shows that victims of trauma, by making disclosures within their networks of support, decrease the level of perceived stigma that is otherwise felt (Andalibi & Forte, 2018).

Initiating Dialogue

The participants realised that it was time to speak up about their experience, and that it was only by acknowledging the issue and having further discussions, that such expression might become normalised. They sought to use their disclosure to start a dialogue on an issue that was otherwise ignored. The social-media-driven #MeToo movement was also seen as a loophole for tackling matters of sexual abuse that could not otherwise be addressed formally in a court of law due to time and resource constraints. This movement provided a way around the problems riddling the formal systems of redressal. Some participants noted the following:

Shaama (25), gender rights activist:

…and it was important to me, primarily because of what I told you earlier, this has been so much repressed. Like we can’t really talk about it. It takes you like multiple accounts where you finally get, sometimes you get the courage, either to finally break that silence or internalise it. So, rather than internalising it, it’s better if we speak about it, at least some sense of awareness would be spread.

Dharaa (27), classical dancer:

Yeah, I just did it because I just wanted it to be a normal situation, just like I wanted for it to be normal to talk about it. So, the fact that I could put out a post and have people respond to it, without having this legality dangling over my head was extremely important for me.

The participants viewed their disclosure as stimulating a conversation, expanding the mainstream discourse and heightening the acceptance of an otherwise taboo topic. Writings on the progression of the #MeToo movement corroborated some of these views, suggesting that the outburst of disclosures online came as an awakening to most people in the society (Tuerkheimer, 2019).

Changing Social Structures

Beyond the personal realm, some of the participants also wished to impact wider society and to effect systematic change. The participants’ expressed expectations that their efforts to disclose could make institutions more cautious and effective in redressing issues whenever such cases arise. They hoped that their disclosures would push these institutions to improve the legally mandated redressal systems. They viewed their disclosure as an instrument to overthrow established social structures, since the act of disclosing became a manner of undermining the prevailing normative order that upheld silence and prevented openly addressing sexual violence. The issue is not nascent and silence over sexual abuse has persisted for long. In a society like India, silence over sexual abuse is encouraged because of the presumed taboo attached to the topic (Gilligan & Akhtar, 2005).

Thus, one of the motives for the participants was also to overturn this normative practice of silencing disclosures of sexual abuse. Their disclosure was seen as a counterpoint to the social norm which encourages silence over sexual abuse (Gilligan & Akhtar, 2005). Further, they acknowledged that their disclosures were aimed at establishing accountability and informing others of the perpetrators’ actions, to prevent future violations, thus, highlighting their concern for justice and retribution. Some participants noted the following:

Glenn (36), journalist:

…if anything, I wanted the university to exercise some sense of self retrospection, so to speak, to see what’s wrong. Actually put a PoSH ¹ in place, instead of speaking about it and not acting on it … the intent was to destabilise the current structures, which nobody is ever comfortable with.

Neha (24), graduate student:

Besides, for me, more than anything else, it was to put out the fact that this man was a predator. I wasn’t making blatant allegations, I was just telling people what my experience was and what I went through. It was just an attempt on my part to warn others who might be victims of this person in the future. Because one of the main reasons that he could keep on doing this, was because people were not aware of his character and what he had done in the past.

The use of disclosures to reflect the limitations in existing social systems has been conceptualised as ‘the normative implications of the new sexual abuse reporting’ (Tuerkheimer, 2019). Other works also note that such feminist collective action groups address issues of social relevance by transforming individual efforts into mass mobilisations with the aim of highlighting the ideology of ‘personal is political’ (Gallagher et al., 2019).