Disclosing as Storytelling, Activism, or Justice?

The #MeToo movement has fostered a social context in which online disclosures of sexual violence are normalised and commonplace; however, there is a longer history of survivors speaking out about sexual violence in a variety of terrestrial and digital contexts. This chapter discusses various ways of speaking out, focussing on how survivor narratives have been politicised since the Women’s Liberation Movement and drawing on feminist literature to argue that these discourses shape how victim-survivors can speak out in the aftermath of sexual violence by framing ‘permissible’ narratives of violence and rendering others ‘unspeakable’. The chapter also examines how stories can be witnessed and heard and foreshadows ‘safety work’ as a central concept that relates to victim-survivors participating in digital society. By examining the history of disclosures of sexual violence in both digital and non-digital contexts, as well as the long-standing feminist history of speaking out, this chapter frames disclosure practices as part of a wider politics, consisting of storytelling, activism—and in some contexts, justice.