UC Irvine

The #MeToo movement, an online social movement related to sexual violence, went viral at a time when several high-powered men were accused of sexual assault and harassment. There were significant tensions within and about the movement that played out in the media. This project employed content media analysis to explore the tensions, particularly around punishment, healing, due process, and counternarratives. The analysis revealed that while accountability was important in the movement and in the discourse, other kinds of justice were also necessary, especially the need to help and protect others. Due process for men accused of sexual violence was a major theme identified in this study. Though the potential for unfairly punishing someone without cause or evidence is a legitimate concern, the discourse and backlash tended to use this concern as a way to shut down the conversation, to suggest that sexual violence was not as a big a problem, and to obscure the goals of leadership and many of the survivors—to support each other and heal. Also obscuring these goals was the backlash of the movement. Analyzing these key themes led me to develop two main concepts. First, survivor justice an abolitionist perspective focused on healing, survivors helping other survivors, and community accountability. Second, I argued that the due process claims reflect a kind of legal consciousness of legal procedures applied to explain everyday interactions, I call this social due process.