Description
The #MeToo movement has raised unprecedented awareness on sexual harassments, assaults, and violence since it went viral across the globe in 2017. Many scholars have studied the impact of the #MeToo movement, particularly how the media and the public perceive and describe the movement. Little is known, however, about how legislators discuss and frame #MeToo and thereby introduce and implement bills that address sexual assaults and violence. Using corpus analyses of speeches and debates taking place in the Taiwan Legislature between May 31 and July 31, 2023, we find that legislators use both the oppressor-blaming frame in which attention is paid to the behavior of the perpetrators and the sexual victimhood frame in which survivors are portrayed as vulnerable victims who are in need of protection and saving. While we also find that legislators have increasingly acknowledged the power imbalances when sexual assaults and violence occur, we also demonstrate that policymakers are solution-driven where they treat combatting sexual violence as a linear process, instead of seeing the multilevel, multidimensional aspects of violence as a by-product of patriarchy. Particularly, by focusing on the neoliberal notion of agency, the findings show that systematic barriers that offer abused women a way out, for example, are still persistent. Therefore, our study offers important implications for the ways in which violence could be dismantled if policymakers focus on the collective agency of survivors with a more comprehensive approach.
