Whenever sexual harassment, sexual assault and sexual violence are in the news, you will likely find Tarana Burke’s voice there too.
When Ryan Seacrest hosted the Academy Awards red carpet show on March 4 despite sexual harassment allegations, Burke was the person reporters turned to for a condemnation of the decision. She was chosen as one of Time Magazine’s “silence breakers,” a group of women speaking out about the issue who received the 2017 Person of the Year honor.
She has also been invited to college campuses across the country to speak about a phrase she coined, the “Me Too” rallying cry of sexual violence survivors. One of those college campus events was hosted recently at Webster University.
“I’ve been crisscrossing the country having conservations on college campuses and in communities to talk about what the Me Too movement is actually about, and really to do the work of shifting the narrative of what mainstream media and corporate America and other people are saying that is,” Burke said. “I’m really hoping to deputize people to also be messengers, to go out and talk about what this work is actually about. And we have so much work to do that it can’t be done by one person.”
“Me Too” was popularized on social media in 2017 when actress Alyssa Milano began using it as a hashtag to discuss the abuse allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein. Milano and many others in Hollywood and beyond used the hashtag to tell their own stories. The hashtag brought renewed attention to Burke, a longtime activist who had been using the phrase since 2006.
Burke said the movement as she envisions it is both about healing and creating plans to fight sexual violence. She said many important factors in the conversation around that subject have been left out, including sex trafficking, child sexual abuse, and the specific problems faced by marginalized people.
While working with young children with behavioral problems, Burke noticed that many of their difficulties stemmed from experiencing sexual abuse at an early age. One of those experiences led to the first use of the “me too” catchphrase in relationship to sexual violence. Burke told the story of meeting a young girl who confessed that she had been sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend. While she didn’t know how to respond at the time, Burke said she later wished she had told the girl, “Me, too.”
That experience was one of the catalysts that inspired Burke to found her first nonprofit, Just Be Inc., in 2006.
“I started it because I was in a community where I saw rampant sexual violence,” Burke said. “I saw that it was not just the violence that was an issue, it was the aftereffects of it.”
At the organization, “Me Too” became part of the narrative Burke used to raise awareness around sexual violence and to assure young victims that they were not alone.
“I believe that survivors of sexual violence are not victims,” Burke said. “We are people who have the wherewithal to develop strategies and solutions on how to end sexual violence in our communities.”
Burke is now the senior director of Girls For Gender Equality, a Brooklyn, New York-based nonprofit organization dedicated to helping increase the self-esteem and self-determination of young girls of color.
Though the phrase “Me Too” has often been seen as a statement about the high rates of sexual assault and harassment faced by women, Burke said she wants to dispel the myth that the solidarity it offers is for women only. Though she noted that most survivors are women, she said the movement is for anyone who has experienced sexual violence.
“You will always see women at the forefront and you will always see us doing the work, because that’s what we do,” Burke said. “But we need all kinds of people to do this work, because we can’t do it alone.”
Burke said she hoped people would walk away from her talk hopeful that the country was ready to have a prolonged conversation about sexual violence.
“The level of pain and trauma around this cannot be tied up in a nice bow,” Burke said. “It can’t be ignored anymore. The cat is out of the bag, and now we have to really move forward to come up with solutions.”
