Soma Sara | MAKERS + Be Bold, London

Soma Sara | MAKERS + Be Bold, London

Video Transcript

SOMA SARA: I'm the founder of Everyone's Invited. And Everyone's Invited is now a charity. But it began as a grassroots movement. And it actually began with talking and conversations. And it was back in June 2020. And I was in my bedroom. I was online all the time. I was talking to my best friends.

And we started looking back on our teenage years. And we just began to realize how many of us had had these really degrading and dehumanizing and traumatic experiences and how a lot of what was happening to us was just so normalized and so entrenched.

And it just seemed so strange that we'd never really articulated what had happened to us before then. And this seemed to be the first time that we were sharing and realizing that we all have this kind of shared trauma of experiencing sexual violence, rape, assault, and sexual harassment, particularly in those really early years and those very formative, vulnerable years of our lives.

So it was in that moment of pause at the beginning of the pandemic-- we were all inside, I was finishing up my university finals-- and from those conversations, I guess I just felt moved. I think it also came from a grounding of anger and frustration. But in that moment, I felt moved to speak out and to talk about it.

So I shared some of those experiences of this idea of a rape culture on my Instagram. So what I mean by that is I'm talking about a culture where violence and rape is allowed to exist, so when thoughts and attitudes and ideas trivialize and normalize sexual violence.

So it's this incremental culture where you have the misogyny and the sexism bleeding into the language and the dehumanizing language that we use, which then leads to the behavior and the violence. And it's this incremental culture where everything is interconnected. And when things like the non-consensual sharing of intimate images or being groped at a house party, when those experiences are normalized, this acts as a gateway to the more extreme experiences of rape and sexual assault.

So I was talking about this general culture of shaming and stigma and victim blaming. And girls were being shamed for having sex. There were these brutal double standards that we were living in.

And the boys were rewarded, and the girls were these transactional-- treated like transactional objects to be valued and rated. And you were shamed for having sex and shamed for not having sex and called frigid and prude. And it was this incredibly difficult time.

And I think back then, we didn't have the confidence to really challenge it. And we didn't have the language to articulate it and to report it or even to seek support from the adults and the teachers and the people who were meant to be looking after us. We didn't speak to them about it because there was so much stigma, so much shame, shrouding these experiences.

And then, in many cases, when you did try and speak out and you did try and question things, you were met with this invalidation and then this double shaming. And then, in so many cases, this is actually called a secondary retraumatization, and it's actually worse, in many cases, than the actual experience of violence itself. And many young people are ostracized and shamed in their own communities and by the people closest to them, so really traumatic.

And trauma is one of those things. It's different for everyone. And it can be overt. It can be covert. It can manifest in your relationships, in your self-worth, in your confidence, in the way that you move through the world.

And it's like you don't even recognize it's there so much of the time, when it's so repressed. It can be delayed. But it really transforms your life, and it doesn't really ever go away. It's something that you have to learn to live with.

So I know I've gone on a huge tangent there but back to where I was in my bedroom and talking about these things and sharing my story. And I shared-- I was literally just on Instagram. I had no plan or intention to begin anything. But I shared my story.

And immediately, I was inundated and overwhelmed with messages and stories, and my peers and my friends and friends of friends and people who I hadn't seen in five years all reaching out to tell me how much they resonated with my experiences. And they, too, began to share their stories with me.

And it created this kind of snowball effect. And I began sharing their stories. And within that week, I received around 300 stories. And this was just from, I guess, my community and the people I knew.

And I just felt, this is so much bigger than this microcosm. This is everywhere. This is a universal culture. It's in the films we watch, the words that we speak. It's in the media. It's in all the institutions within society. It's at every level.

And I just felt in that moment, I have to do something about this. So I decided to create a safe space. And it was about replicating that very simple idea of providing a safe space for people to speak out and share their stories but totally anonymously.

And the anonymity was really important. Because it was allowing survivors to, for the first time in so many cases, actually openly speak out and share experiences that were incredibly stigmatized and really difficult to talk about.

So I created the safe space. And then, over the next year, I was just coming out of university, finishing up my finals. It was the pandemic. There wasn't much going on. I was doing a bit of tutoring on the side. And gradually, I was building this community of survivors, of young people, of activists.

And it wasn't until March 2021 where we called out to our community to share their stories again but this time, to include institutions that were connected to their experiences. And I could never have anticipated the kind of, I guess, the life transformation that I experienced in the next three months where, to my shock, I was suddenly put on the front page of "The Times." And then I was kind of launched into this media storm.

And we built an extraordinary community of over hundreds of thousands of people with them sharing our platform and our page and the stories and the testimonies hundreds of thousands of times on social media, going viral on Instagram and TikTok, and then hitting the headlines and doing media, TV interviews every single day for the next three months. And this was just a really surreal time in my life where I was just-- my life completely transformed.

And it was also a very terrifying time where I'd lost that anonymity. And I'd suddenly become the face of something-- the face of rape culture, which isn't necessarily what I expected at all in my life that I would be doing. And it was a lot.

But I think in those moments, it's so-- I'm definitely going over time here, I'm not sure-- but looking back, literally a few months prior at university, just before the pandemic ended, I'd organized this event. And it was about getting an activist in to speak about public sexual harassment.

And I was so-- I was meant to introduce her-- and I was so nervous. And I literally couldn't-- it was only five people came, five of my best friends. And it was the activist. And I came onto the stage, and I tried to introduce her.

And I literally, I just froze. And I was like, and this is Eliza Hatch. And I ran away. And it was just bizarre that, literally, two months later, I'd be speaking on the BBC. And I think it's just in those moments, it just kind of comes to you, and you feel like you have to do this.

It was almost like this responsibility. This is tens of thousands of people's voices. And you feel-- there's something inside of you, I think, just becomes awakened. And it's like there's no other choice but to move forward.

So I don't know what happened to me in that moment. But suddenly, I was launched onto, I guess, national media. And we, extraordinarily, launched this national conversation. But it was very focused in the UK. And it was about education in schools and universities.

And in the space of the three months, we received over 50,000 stories. And we had this huge reaction from schools across the country. And the government responded. And they launched this national Ofsted review in schools.

So Ofsted is the national regulator in the UK. And the review basically ended up concluding that sexual harassment and sexual abuse online had become totally normalized in schools because of the age that we're living in, because of the mainstreaming of hardcore pornography, because of the digital world, that it's a very different landscape that young people are growing up in.

And it confirmed what we'd been saying from the beginning, that rape culture is universal. It's everywhere. And we all need to do-- we all have a responsibility in this conversation and in tackling it and in challenging it.

So I guess that's the summary of the story. But now, we are focused on education. And our mission is to expose and eradicate rape culture with empathy, compassion, and understanding.

So those are the also absolutely crucial philosophical foundational values of our movement and our organization. It's about leading with empathy and understanding-- empathy for survivors' experiences and trying to recognize and put yourselves in their shoes and listen to them and giving them a platform, but also empathy for those who don't necessarily understand where you're coming from and whose experiences-- they have no understanding of sexual violence.

And it's quite controversial to ask survivors to have empathy for those who've wronged them. But ultimately, we felt that it was so important to really prioritize the ideas of reconciliation and bringing people together. And we want to make a change. But in order to make a change, you need to be able to communicate with love, with respect, with sincerity.

And I think we live in such a divided, polarized, hostile, challenging landscape at the moment, where people are really at each other's throats, and it's about building the bridges. It's about finding what we have in common. It's about relating to each other so that we can expose and relate to these experiences and recognize that they are real and that they happen.

So that's been another huge part of the work. It's the communication piece and the importance of empathy when leading these discussions. But thank you so much for listening and for being here today. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]