Why I'm Not Joining The "Me Too" Campaign

I've probably experienced sexual harassment and/or assault in my lifetime. I'm nearly 32 and I'm a woman so its basically a given.

Particularly when you take a look at your social media channels and see that basically all of your female friends (and some of your male friends) have updated their status to "me too" and included stories of when and where and how it happened.

And some of the stories are terrible; I salute anyone for sharing a painful story because clamming up and burying the truth under a rug never did anyone any favours.

But I'm not going to join you on this one ladies, sorry.

Because in order to respond to this call to action, I'd have to consider what sexual harassment and/or assault really is, and what it means to me. Id then rifle back through my life to try and match any of the thousands of encounters I've had with men and boys and women to determine whether anything fits.

When something inevitably would, I'd share my thoughts online and join the thousands (probably millions) of voices joining together to raise awareness of the scale of this problem. And because Im one of the lucky ones nothing terrible stands out in my memory and I dont consider myself to have been permanently scarred my voice would actually water down the impact of the campaign.

As the Associate Editor of HuffPost Australia put it :

The #MeToo campaign puts the spotlight on the awful fact that seemingly everyone with breath in their body has been sexually harassed at some point in their life. But isn't it also watering down the stories that really deserve to be told?

And while I think that banding together to raise awareness of issues is extraordinarily important (I worked on the #BiggerIssues male suicide awareness campaign of 2015), in this instance I just don't think its helpful.

Presumably, the desired outcome of this activity is to stop men from sexually harassing and/or assaulting women. But you know what this actually does? It turns men into perpetrators or villains, and women into victims.

Just with one simple status update.

These women are capable, independent, brilliant, intelligent, pragmatic people. And now, all of a sudden, they're an injured party. As one of my friends put it in her Facebook status update,

If all the women who have been sexually assaulted (or harassed, but seriously, that is absolutely without doubt 100%) change their status to "me too" perhaps there will be greater comprehension of quite how common this is.

Yes, the reality is it's probably 100% of us.

Of course I've been subject to lewd remarks, inappropriate touching, fear of walking alone at night (or even in the day, depending on what country you're in), being undressed with eyes (or even hands). But I don't for a moment believe that all the men during those encounters were malicious perpetrators or sexual predators.

Nor am I willing to give any of those encounters the power to turn me into a sufferer.

I'm not condoning sexual harassment or assault. Nor do I think women who have been seriously abused should stay silent. But to all of those women out there who haven't given this issue a single thought until this campaign, ask yourself if you're really a victim.

Jojo is a Content & Communications Specialist , writer and mental health campaigner based in Adelaide, Australia.