Authors:
- Elisabeth Krimmer, German Department, University of California, Davis - Author's Personal Website, Academia.edu

- Patricia Anne Simpson, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Nebraska-Lincoln - Humanities Commons, ResearchGate

Summary: »On Octoberr 5, 2017, Jodie Kantor and Megan Twohey of the New York Times published an article that detailed how, for decades, the movie producer Harvey Weinstein had paid off and thus silenced women who accused him of sexual harassment. On October 15, the actress Alyssa Milano retweeted the suggestion of a friend: "If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote 'Me too.' as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem." In the next twenty-four hours, twelve million Facebook posts responded to this invitation. Through her tweet, Milano introduced to a mainstream audience a movement founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke in order to support young women of color who had experienced sexual abuse. In the weeks and months after Milano's tweet, #MeToo resonated around the globe, including in France as #BalanceTonPorc, in China as #RiceBunny, in Spain as #YoTambien, and as #ichauch in Germany, where the most prominent cases involved accusations of sexual assault against the director Dieter Wedel and against Siegfried Mauser, the president of the Musikhochschule Munich.
The worldwide resonance of #MeToo drastically illustrates the ubiquity of sexual abuse and sexual violence and of the failure to acknowledge their impact publicly. It shows that there is a great need not only to hold perpetrators accountable but also to raise public consciousness. All too often, attention is directed exclusively to the victimization of white middle- class women, while neglecting the experiences of women from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, women of color, members of LGBTQ and immigrant communities, and also of men, including, but not limited to, the rape of male prison inmates.« (Source: Cambridge Core)

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of Germany | Literature: German literature / Rape in fiction | Sex and the law: Rape / Rape culture