Women in the Valley are joining thousands to tell harrowing stories of unwanted sexual aggression.
As described by a Gazette story Friday, local women have been responding to a call on Twitter, and through social media generally, to provide personal testimony about the prevalence of an injustice that is far from just “locker-room banter.”
Shaheen Pasha, a journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, responded to an open invitation by writer Kelly Oxford on Twitter to make private experiences public. Pasha wrote of the time, when she was a 20-year-old college student, that she was pushed into a dark hall and kissed by a resident assistant — the same uninvited sexual approach that candidate Donald J. Trump boasted of in the “Access Hollywood” recording. “I tried to figure out what I had done … what I had said … a conversation that would’ve encouraged this,” Pasha tweeted. “It never occurred to me that that was sexual assault.”
Her courage in coming forward, and that of others, must help make clear to all that such conduct constitutes sexual assault.
The owner of a Northampton yoga studio, Michelle Ryan, posted on Facebook about the rape she endured 34 years ago when she was 16. After making that public, nearly two dozen people contacted her to tell of their own experiences with sexual assault.
The term “rape culture” was coined in the 1970s. Decades on, it persists. Brave accounts by victims of sexual assault can help serve to dismantle it.