Survivor Stories: Tarana Burke

Photo credits: Variety

Today, the #MeToo movement is a global social movement and activism campaign against sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and rape, providing survivors an outlet to share their experiences with sexual violence. A survivor-led movement, it is dedicated to facilitating healing, justice, action, and leadership. However, before its global recognition, it began as a small effort by a survivor named Tarana Burke.

“I did not identify as a survivor,” Tarana stated when discussing the sexual assault she experienced from the ages of nine to twelve. “For all those years as a child, I felt complicit in my abuse. The men who molested me, in my mind, were not wrong or bad. I was a bad girl who had done a bad thing.”

So, for years, Tarana tried to become a more well-behaved, perfect child, but when she got to high school, “my religion became Black power,” and “I just decided to embrace anger as a new form of power.”

Fighting became an outlet for her anger, and she joined the 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement and became active in civil rights in college. After graduating from Auburn University at Montgomery, Tarana went to work for 21st Century in 1996 in Selma. While many events in her life, including her own experience, drove her to launch the #MeToo movement, one particularly powerful one was when she didn’t share her own sexual assault when a young girl shared her sexual victimization with her.

Tarana began to understand just how prevalent sexual assault was among middle school Black girls in Selma, but she struggled to determine how to respond, even though she’d been working in community organizing for nearly a decade at the time.

“Then I realized what had helped me,” she said. “The women who wrapped their arms around me, literally and figuratively, and just improvised, just showed me deep amounts of grace and empathy, made me feel so safe and made me feel like I was okay, like I was a person, like what happened to me mattered.”

Tarana has stated that the broader subject of sexual violence in the Black community must be discussed, even if it is “one of the most difficult things to do,” largely because sexual violence has been weaponized specifically against Black men.

“We have seen it over and over again,” she said. “We’ve seen it in the media. We’ve seen it in our communities. We’ve seen it in the most horrific ways actualized in our community.”

She also emphasized that sexual abuse against Black women remains an undisclosed crisis, arguing that serious discussions about human rights, mass incarceration, and police violence should include conversations about sexual violence against Black women. After sharing statistics on the violence that Black women face, she stated that these numbers have to be addressed and unpacked, rather than just seen as cold, hard facts.

Tarana further expressed that a survivor’s “first and highest responsibility” is to themself. “I get people all the time who want to start a movement or join a movement,” she said. “They want to immediately jump to activism, and my first question is always, ‘What have you done for yourself?’ I think we underestimate the load that it is to carry survival.”

Besides continuing to inspire and help others through her global non-profit called “me too.,” which focuses on supporting sexual abuse survivors, Tarana has also authored an acclaimed memoir, Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement, in which she recounts her personal story of sexual assault.

Her story had illustrated the power of speaking out, both for individuals and for the broader community. The strength of joined forces and uplifted voices should not be underestimated.

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Jurisview Journal is a student-led blog that publishes biweekly articles about interesting criminal cases. Our aim is to shed light on cases that require justice or further exploration and provide input on controversial legal events. We also publish infographics to help victims or those who wish to educate themselves on legal issues. 

In this series, Survivor Stories, we explore and share the stories of survivors of violence and crime. Through this, we advocate for justice and more attention to victims such as the survivors we feature.