Shamed if we do, shamed if we don’t.
“Why didn’t you report your assault?”
*Reports assault*
“Liar.”
Reporting sexual assault is not easy and most assaults go unreported. Often times women are asked, What were you wearing? Were you flirting with him? Were you drinking? Why didn’t you report it sooner?
If you have ever asked yourself the last question, this and over 68, 000 people will tell you why.
Jessica Leeds, is a woman who recently shared her experience of sexual assault by none other than the Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump.
Remember at the second presidential debate when Anderson Cooper asked Trump if he ever “did those things” he said on the Trump Tapes? Well… he did.
However, instead of listening to her story and doing something about it, victim blaming was in full effect on the Twitter stage yesterday.
Lou Dobbs is a Fox Business Network anchor who made a BIG mistake on Twitter. Dobbs tweeted out the personal information of one of Trump’s accusers of sexual assault, Jessica Leeds. Within the tweet, contained her address and phone number. Dobbs’s tweet originated from another Twitter user who posted the information. Dobbs is a devout Trump supporter and shared Leeds’s personal information with all 795,000 of his followers.
Dobbs later apologized on Twitter, considering that sharing other’s personal information is against the terms and conditions of Twitter to share personal information across the site. The tweet was available yesterday but has since been removed.
This is the treatment that a victim gets for bravely reporting her story? Doxxing and backlash reverberated across the Twitter-sphere?
https://twitter.com/LouDobbs/status/786646963051638784
However, the controversy doesn’t end there. Over 68,000 people contributed to a larger conversation about #WhyWomenDontReport. This hashtag gained instant attention by women in a similar way that the #NotOk did after the release of the Trump Tapes where Trump was caught discussing sexually assaulting women. #WhyWomenDontReport was created in response to Dobbs’s breach of confidentiality for a victim’s personal information in which he released across cyberspace to a grand audience.
This hashtag created a virtual space for women to share their narratives and frustrations about how society has a major victim blaming problem. Many of these stories contain narratives of personal experiences, accounts of rape culture, and victim blaming.
The most infuriating thing on this feed is that many conservative organizations and major conversation leaders used this as a soapbox to bash Bill Clinton in order to detract from the main message. While neither is acceptable, this is not about politics. This is a larger social issue in which society places the blame on a brave victim of assault for speaking out. These trends are often times used as a place for pointing fingers rather than allow the crowd to let their voices be heard.
The chart below shows the trend huge spike in use at around 8 p.m. According to Politico, Lou’s apology tweet hit twitter at around 3:25 p.m. where he shared the article written about his indiscretion and said, “My retweet, my mistake.” After that, you see a major spike in the conversation when people begin using the hashtag #WhyWomenDontReport.
Below is a conversation cloud that includes keywords that were used in association with the hashtag. Staggering statistics were posted by a user who shared this tweet:
https://twitter.com/SareanaKimia/status/786721974781353984
This post shows keywords in the conversation clouds because her post was retweeted over 7,000 times and favorited by over 6,000 users. 
These staggering statistics and chilling words reveal only minor details about the intensity of this trending Twitter conversation. While we gear up for election day, women voters will not forget the lewd and horrific things Donald Trump has said and done to women. Victims of sexual assault are being retraumatized daily by the uncovering of Trump’s disturbing past and the virality of these conversations.
Shamed if we do, shamed if we don’t. Victim blaming needs to come to an end and the ability to share narratives, take a stand, and say it is wrong, will hopefully empower more women to fight back against the shaming.
