Nonparticipation of bangladeshi women in #MeToo movement

Abstract

In October 2017, an unprecedented social media movement started where women from all around the world publicly shared their untold stories of being sexually harassed using the hashtag #MeToo (or some variants of it). While this movement raised voices against sexual harassment across the globe, many women in South Asia did not participate in this movement. In this paper, we present our study on non-participation of many Bangladeshi women in this movement through an anonymous online survey (n = 180), and an in-depth interview study (n = 30). Our study shows that many Bangladeshi women, despite being supportive of the movement, did not participate in this movement because of several social, cultural, and infrastructural reasons. We use transnational feminism as a theoretical framework to explain their non-participation. We further discuss how the lessons learned from this study help us better understand the participation, functioning, and impact of social media movements.