Brenda Longfellow is a feminist documentary filmmaker and professor of Film Studies and Production at York University. 

What inspired you to start working on an interactive web documentary based on the hashtag #Beenrapedneverreported?

I was very inspired by the hashtag #beenrapedneverreported created after the Jian Ghomeshi scandal. I observed how this hashtag took off like lightning, how a 140 character tweet created and contributed to a global conversation. That hashtag has had more than 8 million tweets, re-tweets and impressions in multiple languages including in French #aggressionnondénoncée. What I think it showed was that while social media can be frivolous it can also be used for incredible social purpose. Violence against women has been a feminist issue in Canada since the beginning of second wave feminism when great efforts were being made to change legislation around sexual assault after the Montreal massacre. There followed a hiatus where feminist discourse around the issue had been missing from the public arena. Part of that was to do with the conservative government slashing funding to different feminist groups. Another part of it has to do with dominant ideas about living in a perceived “post feminism era”. When you start looking at the stats around sexual assault you realize that 90% of women who have been assaulted do not report and very few cases go forward from complaints. Successful convictions may be 3% of those cases. You have to think there’s something fundamentally wrong with the criminal justice system and the culture that produces shame, blames the survivor and allows women to internalize guilt about something that happened to them instead of placing blame on the perpetrator. Something is broken and wrong, we are clearly not living in a post feminist era.

How does the creation of an alternative online forum challenge the culture of shame and shift the conversation?

Twitter allows for instant intimate connection where some contributors are anonymous and some are not. Women I’ve spoken to who contributed to the #hashtag – saw that other women were doing it and thought that now is the time to do it. It created an incredible domino affect. Two journalists: Sue Montgomery from the Montreal gazette and Antonia Zerbisias from the Toronto Star created this thing that 40 years of feminist organizing had difficulty doing, to generate a large collective conversation about sexual assault and the culture of shame.

What do you think are the limits of social media as the space where these conversations take place?

One of the things about social media is that it gathers voices and can become phenomena but if you don’t sustain the momentum they disappear. That is kind of the intention of the film project, to try and maintain the momentum. To try to expand from twitter to on-camera testimonies that can also be anonymous, people are invited to upload their own work, art and stories. The project will be based in working collaboratively with feminist groups – as broad based as possible. That is an important aspect of participatory documentary – to continue a collaborative conversation. Doing it with women, about women. The Impetus of women on twitter sharing through the #hashtag was that women were forwarding themselves.

 

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