At the 16th GLAMOUR Women of the Year Awards, in partnership with Samsung, we’re honouring those women who aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo and reshape the world. From activism to acting, our winners are working across a variety of industries to make the world a better, more equal place.
Taking home the Activist of the Year Award is Soma Sara, the founder of Everyone's Invited – a grassroots campaign which empowers survivors of sexual violence to share their stories. Her book of the same name is a powerful call to action, demanding a world where women and girls are safe.
In the past year, I’ve experienced many “pinch-me” moments. And speaking on a panel at Cheltenham Literature Festival with the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, Laura Bates, was surely up there. Bates spoke powerfully about the UK’s broken policing system, in which reports of sexual violence, abuse and harassment in the force are repeatedly declared as ‘isolated incidents’, pointing to corrupt individual officers and ‘bad apples’, rather than the reality: the entire system is unfit for purpose.
And our broken policing system is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the culture of misogyny and sexual violence in the UK.
That’s why I started my platform, Everyone’s Invited, over two years ago. Since then, we've collected tens of thousands of submissions of rape culture in the UK. These testimonies expose the scale of sexual harassment, abuse and violence amongst young people and in society at large.
It started from conversations with female friends in the summer of 2020, while I was in my final year at university, at the beginning of the pandemic. When my friends and I looked back on our teenage years, we began to realise that there were so many moments that felt ‘wrong’, ‘weird’ and ‘uncomfortable’. We grew up in a deeply misogynistic culture where harassment and incidents of sexual assault were not rare. Boys joked about sexual violence, and girls were humiliated and bullied online, while nudes were non-consensually sent around schools like the latest viral meme. When we started having sex, girls were slut-shamed and called ‘slags’, while boys were rewarded and hailed as heroes.
From slut-shaming in the playground to media reporting around rape, something needs to change.
Realising the brutal double standards that plagued us as young girls, I decided to share some of my experiences on Instagram. Almost immediately, I was inundated with hundreds of messages. Old friends, school friends, university friends, mutual friends, people who I hadn't seen in five years – they all reached out to tell me how much they resonated with my story and the abuse and trauma they faced throughout their teenage years. I began sharing these stories, and the more I shared, the more I received. I was overwhelmed as the stories poured in, unleashing a tidal wave of voices. It was heartbreaking to confront the scale of abuse and violence, but it was also so moving and empowering to have these intimate conversations, to know something simple but revolutionary – that I wasn’t alone.
These experiences of abuse, harassment and violence were not rare or ‘isolated’. On the contrary: they were normalised and entrenched into our daily lives through a broken system where abusive and dehumanising behaviour isn’t punished, and perpetrators aren’t held accountable. When a woman in the UK is murdered every three days, when 136 women worldwide are killed by a family member every single day, when 56 MPs are currently under investigation for sexual misconduct, when a child is raped in school on every school day, when 9 out of 10 girls have received unsolicited dick pics, when just 1.4% of all rape cases lead to a suspect being charged or summonsed, the threat of violence against women is a daily reality. Rape culture is rife across every sector, it is alive in education, schools, universities, policing, the health sector, parliament and in the criminal justice system. It is universal. It is normal.
Following the explosion of Everyone’s Invited, I decided to write a collection of essays to investigate and interrogate the root causes of this culture to find meaningful ways to eradicate it.
The essays explore many topics, looking at the toxic impact of overly restrictive gender scripts, the role of mainstream hardcore porn in the modern sexual landscape, the rapid rise of image-based abuse and harassment on social media where there is little distinction between the offline and online for a generation that has come of age in the digital revolution of the social world. In these essays, I highlight how the testimonies revealed a spectrum of dehumanisation that begins with harmful attitudes, derogatory comments, the rating and reduction of women to sexual trophies, to the collection of nudes, voyeurism, objectification, stalking, the abuse of power, which ultimately culminates in violence; to rape and to murder.
"We must be vigilant in our activism and recognise this as a lifelong commitment."
So, what do we do? Change is needed on a societal level but also on an individual one. You can make a difference in your communities, amongst your friends and families. Question problematic behaviour, call it out, and challenge misogyny and sexism in your everyday life but do this with empathy, compassion and understanding. Support survivors, uplift and platform survivor voices, especially those of the most marginalised in society. Create safe open spaces where survivors are heard, and supported, where help is clearly signposted and accessible. Keep talking about it, keep raising awareness, keep the conversation going. We must be vigilant in our activism and recognise this as a lifelong commitment. We are all responsible for this culture. If we want to eradicate it, we all need to stand up and challenge it in our daily lives.
We must act, and we must continue to act because lives are at stake. Because we deserve better. Because no young girl should be scared to walk home after school in her school uniform. She shouldn’t have to change her clothes, cover up, or keep her keys between her knuckles. Women should be free to live without the imminent threat of violence always lurking, an inescapable presence looming in the back of our minds. Because living in fear isn’t really living. It’s just surviving.
We're told to be more careful. That we are responsible for avoiding our own rape or murder.
