I really try to stay away from sexual violence and the surrounding discourse, especially when it involves high-profile cases. When personal tragedies become public spectacles, I know the plot has been lost and the floodgates of misinformation have opened. So imagine my shock when I logged on to find that everyone was suddenly Jane Doe.
I am Jane Doe emerged as a rally against suspected doxxing of an alleged victim. However, quickly after, people began sharing personal experiences and participating in a collective identity built around someone else’s circumstances.
There is nothing inherently wrong with expressing solidarity. Collective outrage draws attention to abuses that would’ve otherwise been ignored, and public support can remind a person that they are not alone. However, the meaning of a statement changes as it spreads, particularly when it becomes a slogan detached from the circumstances that conceived it.
I understand the impulse and logic behind this. But I also believe that, when discussing something as sensitive as sexual violence, good intentions are not enough. We must be precise about what we are saying, what we are doing, and whose experiences we are centering. At its core, the statement was protection, an act of resistance against the thirst for her identity. However, support often becomes a segue into the unsolicited disclosure of deeply personal information.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that survivors should remain silent about their experiences. People have every right to speak about what happened to them and sharing personal experiences can be a meaningful act of reclamation. However, the right to speak about one’s own experience is not the same as a responsibility to disclose it in response to someone else’s.
There is a difference between saying, I support her, I believe that people deserve privacy, and I oppose the harassment of alleged victims, and saying, I am her. The former expresses solidarity while preserving distinction between two separate people; the later risks collapsing that distinction entirely. It takes an individual with specific circumstances and transforms them into a medium through which other people communicate their own pain. That transformation may seem harmless, even comforting, but it deserves scrutiny. Empathy is not the same as identification, and identification is not necessarily the highest form of empathy. We do not need to internalize another person’s experience as to recognize their humanity.
Like a bomb, mishandling the vocabulary can have grave consequences. The language is already complicated by public scrutiny, uncertainty and the tendency to treat intimate suffering as collective consumption. (The true crime community will have to answer for this eventually). A slogan can become a trend that becomes a performance that can inadvertently disregard the personal boundaries that it was supposed to protect.
When we speak about another person’s trauma, we must consider what we intend to communicate and what our words might encourage others to do. If the purpose of a campaign is to oppose the exposure, it is worth asking whether turning that person’s pseudonym into a widespread personal declaration reinforces or obscures anonymity.
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Inclusivity is not always the answer. We have become accustomed to treating the expansion of a movement as evidence of its success, but inclusivity can come at a cost. When a message becomes broad enough to accommodate everyone, it can lose the specificity that made it necessary in the first place. The problem is not that more people care. The problem is that participation can become an end in itself, displacing the original objective. When everyone becomes the subject of a statement that was meant to protect someone else, the person at its center paradoxically becomes less visible.
Solidarity should widen the circle of people willing to defend someone’s autonomy. This becomes clearer considering the different ways social movements develop. Consider, for example, #MeToo. Though the movement expanded beyond individual incidents and came to represent broader systemic concerns, the origins and organizing principles illustrate different relationships between a specific injustice and collective participation. The phrase was popularized internationally in 2017 amid a wave of sexual misconduct allegations, activist Tarana Burke established the #MeToo movement years earlier to support survivors of sexual violence, particularly young women of color. Its organizing premise was collective recognition: survivors could share a phrase to communicate that they were not alone in experiences that had often been isolated, stigmatized or silenced.
In that sense, #MeToo did not depend on the public adopting one identity. Its collective dimension was built around recognizing that many individuals had distinct experiences connected by a broader pattern of misconduct and unequal power. The movement could grow through shared experience while maintaining the distinction between individual survivors.
#MeToo invited people to acknowledge their own experiences as part of a broader social problem. I Am Jane Doe, as it is being used in this context, risks inviting people to identify themselves through someone else’s particular circumstances. One approach creates solidarity through recognizing many individual experiences; the other, through symbolically merging those experiences into one identity. Of course, no movement remains perfectly consistent with its original intentions, and #MeToo has also faced questions about whose experiences receive attention and how individual stories are represented. The comparison is not intended to establish that one movement succeeded where another failed but rather to highlight a difference in framework.
There is also a question of autonomy. Sexual violence involves profound violations of autonomy and boundaries. The response should be careful not to introduce another situation that precedes the victim’s best interest. This is why I find the impulse to collectively become Jane Doe so troubling. The alleged victim’s decision to remain anonymous does not create a vacancy and is not an unfinished statement. That choice should be respected without qualification.
She should not have to share the emotional space surrounding her own experience with an expanding crowd of people who may be acting in good faith, but whose participation can make it harder to distinguish her individual circumstances from the public’s collective reaction.
Ultimately, I think we need to reconsider what meaningful support looks like. It requires knowing when not to speak and understanding that compassion does not entail proximity.Despite the good intentions behind I Am Jane Doe, we should be able to stand beside someone without standing in their place.
The alleged victim is an individual, not an empty space for public sentiment to fill. If the purpose of this movement is to protect her autonomy, then that must include respecting the distance she has chosen to maintain between herself and the public. Sometimes, the most meaningful way to say, “You are not alone,” is to resist the temptation to say, “I am you.”
I am not Jane Doe. And neither are you.