The lesson here is that the best awareness campaigns are decentralized. They allow the survivor to retain agency over their narrative while borrowing the strength of a collective.
In 2014, writer Beverly Gooden started a hashtag: #WhyIStayed. For the first time, survivors of domestic abuse shared the nuanced, messy reality of abuse—the economic coercion, the fear for pets, the gaslighting. Previously, awareness campaigns focused on black eyes and restraining orders. Gooden’s story, and the thousands that followed, educated the public on coercive control . rapesection com free