More insidiously, it commodifies suffering.
Real survival is messy. Real survivors have relapses. They have days where they can’t get out of bed. They have complicated relationships with their abusers. They use dark humor to cope. They are sometimes angry, sometimes irrational, and often still broken in ways that don’t fit into a 90-second video.
Stop counting impressions and retweets. Count hotline calls that result in a safe bed. Count policy changes. Count the number of times a friend intervened before the abuse escalated. Awareness is not a metric. It is a bridge to action. The Final Confession I am a survivor. I am also a former campaign director. And I have been complicit in asking other survivors to perform their pain for a good cause. 14 Year Old Girl Fucked And Raped By Big Dog Animal Sex
For a decade, I worked on the backend of nonprofit campaigns. I wrote the press releases. I designed the fact sheets. I curated the "survivor stories" for the annual gala. And I learned a brutal lesson: Statistics numb us. But stories change us. And without the latter, the former is just noise.
This is the paradox we refuse to discuss: We ask the most wounded among us to do the heaviest lifting, and then we thank them with a gift bag and a standing ovation before moving on to the next crisis. Let’s name the elephant in the room. More insidiously, it commodifies suffering
But the campaign apparatus often exploits that defiance without protecting the person behind it.
Most awareness campaigns are designed by committees. Lawyers, marketers, and development directors sit in a room and ask: What story can we tell that won’t scare away our donors? They have days where they can’t get out of bed
And that is when I realized we had it backwards. We weren't trying to save survivors. We were trying to sanitize them. There is a specific trauma to telling your story publicly.
I have watched survivors be re-traumatized by Q&A sessions where audience members asked graphic, voyeuristic questions. I have watched them be triggered by campaign photoshoots that required them to recreate the setting of their assault. I have watched them be discarded when their story stopped being “timely.”
For survivors, the act of speaking is a reclamation of power. For years, silence was the weapon used against us. “Don’t tell anyone.” “It’s our secret.” “No one will believe you.” So when a survivor steps onto a stage or types out a thread on Twitter, they are engaging in an act of radical defiance.