One Woman’s Tweet Takes Fear Away from Many Others

Women in Namibia have put aside their fears of speaking out against sexual predators thanks to the #MeTooNamibia movement, started by the country’s first woman to use social media to find predators and offer support to survivors.

The woman, Monica Geingos, started the movement with the first tweet shaming a rapist in the country. Although campaigners say the #MeToo movement has been slow to take off in Africa due to women’s fear of speaking out, the one tweet quickly led to hundreds more.

“For a small country, we were alarmed at the number of women sharing stories online,” says Namibian activist Venicia Shanjenka, a founding members of women’s empowerment organization Slut Shame Walk and a member of #MeTooNamibia, to the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “We are currently using the testimonies from social media to build a sex offenders list for prosecutions.”

Shanjenka also says that the private database will be taken to the Supreme Court before going online in the next year. Geingos has largely funded the costs of running #MeTooNamibia from her own pocket, including providing sexual assault survivors with legal and psychological support.