About 1,000 people yesterday participated in a rally in Taipei to support the #MeToo movement against sexual assault and harassment, and calling for an end to a culture that prevents victims from speaking out.
Participants wore masks during the rally to symbolize society placing the blame on victims of sexual violence. Toward the end of the rally, participants took off their masks and threw them in the air to symbolize breaking free from the shackles of shame.
Garden of Hope Foundation chief executive officer Chi Hui-jung (紀惠容) said her group organized the rally because the #MeToo campaign in Taiwan has been more quiet than elsewhere.
Photo: Peter Lo, Taipei Times
Victims of sexual assault do come forward, but only sporadically, Chi said.
Taiwanese society needs to break free from the myths surrounding sexual assault, which prevent victims from speaking out, she said.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Yu Mei-nu (尤美女) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alicia Wang (王育敏) were among those who attended the event at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.
The #MeToo movement began last year as a hashtag on social media to encourage people to speak about their experiences of being sexually assaulted and harassed, following sexual abuse allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.
Separately, the local Modern Women’s Foundation is urging Taiwanese to join people around the world by wearing jeans on Denim Day on Wednesday to raise awareness about sexual violence in solidarity with rape victims.
The foundation on Friday released a survey detailing attitudes to sexual assault.
Sixty-five percent of all respondents and 70 percent of male respondents agreed that a woman bears some responsibility for being sexually assaulted if she behaves too casually, wears sexy clothing or frequents nightclubs, the survey showed.
Sixty-one percent of all respondents and 67 percent of male respondents said that sexual assault victims fail to adequately protect themselves, which contributes to them being attacked, the survey showed.
Men endorse such ideas more than women, the survey found.
Sixty-six percent of male respondents believe a woman wants to have sex if she is alone in a room with a man, while 64 percent of men believe a woman wants to have sex if she wears sexy clothes. Forty-eight percent and 46 percent of female respondents held the same views, respectively.
The survey shows a majority of Taiwanese still have many misconceptions about sexual assault, the foundation’s chief executive officer Jack Van (范國勇) said.
It is normal social behavior for a woman to visit nightclubs, drink alcohol and be alone with a man, and it does not necessarily mean she wants to have sex, Fan said.
The survey, which was conducted between March 29 and April 5, collected 1,111 valid samples from respondents over the age of 15. It has a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.
The foundation urged Taiwanese to upload photographs of themselves wearing jeans to their social media pages on Wednesday, and add the hashtag #onlyYESmeansYES to their posts.
Denim Day originated in the 1990s in Italy when the Italian Supreme Court overturned a rape conviction on the grounds that the jeans worn by the victim were too tight to have been removed by the suspect alone, implying that the woman must have consented.
The case took place in 1992 and involved an 18-year-old woman who accused her 45-year-old driving instructor of rape.
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
Taiwan’s passport ranked 34th in the world, with access to 141 visa-free destinations, according to the latest update to the Henley Passport Index released today. The index put together by Henley & Partners ranks 199 passports globally based on the number of destinations holders can access without a visa out of 227, and is updated monthly. The 141 visa-free destinations for Taiwanese passport holders are a slight decrease from last year, when holders had access to 145 destinations. Botswana and Columbia are among the countries that have recently ended visa-free status for Taiwanese after “bowing to pressure from the Chinese government,” the Ministry
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