How #MeToo can fulfill its original mission

This article How #MeToo can fulfill its original mission was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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The recent high-profile verdict of Sean “Diddy” Combs — along with renewed speculation around President Donald Trump’s relationship to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — has left many wondering about the true meaning of justice for survivors. In particular, survivor advocates are beginning to ask the deeper question: What comes after the headlines fade?

To answer that, we have to remember where the movement began. #MeToo was not born in a celebrity moment — it predates the viral era by over a decade. In 2006, Tarana Burke, a survivor and longtime community organizer, created the Me Too movement to provide healing and solidarity primarily to Black youth and youth of color through the concept of “empowerment through empathy.” It wasn’t until 2017, when actress Alyssa Milano’s tweet propelled the phrase into the global spotlight, that the movement became the ubiquitous hashtag we recognize today.

This history matters. It reminds us that #MeToo, at its core, was about healing and empowerment, not sensationalism. I’ve been part of this work from the inside, organizing for survivor justice as a survivor myself, an advocate and someone who’s worked within the #MeToo movement. I know firsthand that its original promise was never just about calling out abusers in Hollywood — it was about transforming our society’s relationship to power, accountability and collective healing. That promise is still within reach, but only if we resist reducing the movement to punishing individual perpetrators and instead confront the systems that allow abuse to thrive.

To fulfill its original vision, we must turn toward abolition feminism, a framework that asks not just who caused harm, but what systems allowed it to thrive. It challenges the capitalist, hyper-individualist lens that defines justice as a single conviction and instead demands structural change: dismantling the institutions that perpetuate violence and investing in survivor-led solutions, community care and transformative accountability.

“Sensational trials have become the face of the movement,” said Sirius Bonner, executive director of gender justice collaborative Intersect Northwest. “But that’s not what survivor justice looks like for most people. The average person isn’t a celebrity and doesn’t have media leverage. The focus on famous perpetrators often disconnects us from real, everyday experiences of harm.”

Bonner emphasized that the survivor justice movement has become increasingly fractured under political pressure and cultural backlash.

“There’s a real effort to dismantle progress,” Bonner said. “Here in Oregon, we’re seeing rollbacks of protections, declining urgency, and self-destructive behavior through ideological purity tests and infighting on the left that weakens our power as a movement. Meanwhile, the opposition has spent 50 years mastering cohesion and strategy.”

JoEllen Chernow, co-founder of Survivors Know — a survivor-led organization in Chicago focused on dismantling power-based violence and oppression — echoed similar frustrations as an organizer within the survivor justice movement.

“The system is designed to isolate survivors and underfund their needs,” she said. “State and federal funding come with strings attached. It limits the kinds of radical, community-rooted solutions that we know work.” Chernow pointed out that this funding model incentivizes short-term crisis response over long-term prevention or healing work, and often excludes culturally specific or grassroots initiatives led by those most impacted.

For Chernow, shifting away from the criminal legal system is a crucial part of the solution. “We have to stop imagining prison as the only response to harm and justice,” she said. “There is a significant gap between survivors reaching out for support and those receiving services, which presents a disconnect between what survivors want and what programs are being funded.”

The survivor justice movement is at a crossroads, where those of us within it can either continue reacting to the news cycle or commit to something more visionary: a movement that centers the most marginalized survivors, challenges systemic violence and invests in healing over punishment. Abolition feminism offers a path forward by shifting our focus from punishing individual perpetrators to dismantling the systems that allow abuse to persist. It would strengthen the movement by uniting survivor justice with broader struggles for racial, economic and gender justice, as well as build coalitions across issues like housing, health care and workers’ rights. 

By addressing the root causes of harm and creating community-based systems of care and accountability, abolition feminism expands the scope of the movement, making it more inclusive, resilient and capable of preventing violence before it happens. We already know the limits of relying on courts, the carceral system or celebrity confessions. We’ve seen how the spectacle of justice distracts from the actual conditions that make violence so widespread, tolerated and routine. 

Our justice system stands in stark opposition to healing justice. For survivors, the road to justice is strewn with obstacles: laws demanding “beyond a reasonable doubt,” invasive court scrutiny that retraumatizes, rampant backlogs, lost evidence and even criminalization of survivors themselves. Too often, survivors enter a system that punishes, disbelieves and abandons them. This is why abolition feminism matters, not as an ideological critique, but as a response to the daily violence the system continues to inflict.

It’s time to act on the vision abolition feminism offers: one that dismantles the systems enabling violence and replaces them with networks of care, survivor-led solutions and transformative accountability. 

Both Bonner and Chernow emphasized the need for strategic alignment among organizations doing this work. That includes not just survivor-led nonprofits like Survivors Know and Haseya Advocate Program, but also policy institutions like the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence, local social change organizations like Call to Safety and transformative justice practitioners like the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective.

“We need to build trust and shared understanding,” Bonner said. “That’s how we shift power together.”

Chernow pointed to the Diddy trial as a stark example of how workplace abuse is often addressed only through legal channels, despite the limits of that approach. She emphasized that organizing and community-based support systems can play a critical role in accountability, but require resources and imagination to thrive. She emphasized that organizations need “more space to dream and strategize beyond crisis management.”

That vision comes to life in survivor-led work like Reimagining Safety and Justice. This six-month learning lab through Survivors Know helps anti-violence workers imagine new practices for healing and accountability. Participants, many of whom are survivors, develop projects that range from creating survivor-led crisis response teams to piloting community accountability circles operating outside the criminal legal system. The program puts a focus on co-creating community agreements, challenging harmful norms in domestic violence shelters, and sharing resources across organizations so that accountability isn’t dependent on punitive measures. In many ways, it is proof that survivors already have the tools to address harm — they just need the resources and freedom to lead.

Survivors know what we need. We have been building solutions long before the headlines and after the cameras are gone. From mutual aid networks to community accountability practices, survivors — especially those from marginalized communities — have always led the way in imagining what safety and justice can look like.

As Chernow explained, frontline anti-violence workers such as social workers, court advocates and housing coordinators see every day how our current systems fail survivors. Through programs like theirs, these workers are developing community-based, noncarceral interventions grounded in trust, care and solidarity. “The ideas survivors are building are beautiful and urgently needed,” Chernow said. But she stressed that scaling up this work means exposing how much federal funding for survivor services — through laws like the Violence Against Women Act and the Victims of Crime Act — is funneled into policing, prosecution and courts. Very little actually reaches survivor-led programs. As a result, redirecting those resources, she argued, could create the kind of safety, care and healing survivors deserve.

Another example of what’s possible is the now-inactive Survivors Agenda, a national, survivor-led platform developed in 2020 through listening sessions with thousands of survivors, which culminated in the Survivors Summit. Its priorities went far beyond the courtroom and took an intersectional approach, calling for investments in housing, health care, economic justice and education as essential to ending sexual violence. 

Despite no longer being active, Survivors Agenda remains a powerful blueprint for what a broad-based coalition could look like today — one that unites survivors, community organizations and policy leaders from across the country around systemic solutions instead of piecemeal reforms. In a moment when the movement risks fragmentation, we need something like the Survivors Agenda more than ever. We need a shared platform that amplifies survivor voices and aligns us toward collective action. Survivors are not waiting for permission to lead — we already have the vision and the roadmap.

We need a survivor justice movement that doesn’t just seek justice after harm has occurred, but one that builds the conditions where harm is less likely in the first place. We need a movement that centers healing and connection instead of sensational headlines and isolation. Ultimately, we need systems change, not symbolic wins.

The future of survivor justice isn’t just about who goes to jail. It’s about whether we’re ready to build a world where survivors and the communities they belong to can thrive, and where violence no longer feels inevitable. In fact, as Angela Davis wrote in “Abolition. Feminism. Now.,” the more expansive approach of “moving beyond merely responding to partner violence and sexual assault has led to the inclusion of immigrant rights, Indigenous treaty rights and reproductive justice, as well as the violence of incarceration and militarism.” 

Davis’s words remind us that abolition feminism isn’t a destination — it’s an ongoing project of expansion, connection, imagination and liberation. This is the call to be intentional in building that world.

This article How #MeToo can fulfill its original mission was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/08/how-metoo-can-fulfill-its-original-mission/