Investigative Exercise 2: Blogs

For this exercise, I chose to discuss this post by The Librarian in Black. I apologise that it has little to do with libraries, but I was told to write about something that interested me, and this did.

Reading about Sarah's experiences with sexual harassment in the workplace got me thinking about how social media can be a powerful tool in the (fairly limited) arsenal of sexual assault victims.

Since 2012 there has been a spate of accusations against almost two dozen prominent YouTubers, sparking public outcry across social media platforms. Friends and associates of the accused encouraged victims to come forward and share their stories. Many prominent YouTubers responded by starting campaigns to combat sexual abuse in their community, such as the This is Abuse campaign and Laci Green's open letter to Sam Pepper, and Laci Green, Charlie McDonald and Rhiannon McGavin (among others) posted videos in response to the scandals.

Their actions led to many of the accused having their accounts taken down and being dropped by their record companies. Even though most of these cases never went to trial, this is an astoundingly positive result- but will it be enough to reduce the incidence of YouTube-related sexual assaults in the future?

On the one hand, giving people the power to call out these incidences through social media has led to much more awareness in the online community about abuse and misogyny. On the other hand, the roots of these problems go deep. I could write a whole other post about socialisation and institutionalised sexism, but I'm not going to.

One of the problems with YouTube is that it's a reflection of the real world. The people with the most fame and influence are white men- and then there's everyone else. There's also the problem of celebrity culture and poorly regulated YouTube conventions that make it easy for abuse to happen.

In my opinion, if change is going to happen, it has to happen at an institutional and cultural level, and it'll take time and effort and it'll be hard. Before that, we have to admit there's a problem first in the first place. I think maybe talking about it on social media is the first step towards that.