Many people, especially teenagers, use the Tik Tok app to report sexual assaults against them to demonstrate that these abuses do not define them.
More and more users of the popular youth app, Tik Tok, are sharing videos where they testify about their sexual assaults. This is a way for them to "recover" their value and show that the abuse and trauma they suffered do not define them.
In some videos, teenagers show off what they wore when they were raped, others use paint to show where they were hit by their executioner or speak directly to their attackers, on the song "It's Time To Begin" of the Imagine Dragons group. "I was 14 years old. He was 18 years old. He told me that we were going to do Christmas shopping for his mom"says a young woman. "I am not a victim. I am a survivor. It is getting better, I promise.", assures another. "For the person who saw a child as his toy: I am now a strong and powerful man. I am learning to love the body that you treated as a toy.", says a young man to his attacker.
These sharings started during the Denim Day, a day that encourages wearing jeans to draw attention to rape and sexual assault against women. Why jeans? The movement began in Italy in the 1990s after a judgment of the Italian Supreme Court, where a conviction for rape was quashed because the courts considered that, since the victim wore tight jeans, she must have encouraged the person who l had attacked to withdraw it, thus implying consent. Faced with this shocking verdict, many Italian women had expressed their anger by demonstrating on the steps of the Supreme Court, in jeans. This protest has since become an international movement in which of Thousands of women are campaigning to raise awareness about the blame of the victims and the myths surrounding sexual violence.
The first videos shared on the platform encouraged more victims of sexual violence to come out of the silence and other Internet users to show their support for the survivors.
#IWas: victims reveal their age at the time of the rape
by Sarah Chekroun