Recently, the Epstein files have left many questioning gender justice and the mechanisms through which elites, as a class, cultivate exclusive networks of influence, evading accountability and receiving institutional support and legal safeguards. Jeffrey Epstein came from a non-elite background in the United States and sought to establish his presence among the elite circle. Very soon, he made his way to the elite section, connecting with well-known academicians, philanthropists, prominent political leaders and high-profile businessmen. His parties and gatherings revealed the gory details of underage teenagers and children used for entertainment by the prominent leaders. The collection of documents contains victim testimonies, media and journalistic investigations, and email exchanges of high-profile people released online that contain details of exploitation and trafficking of children and women, apart from financial frauds and other crimes. This brings one back to the MeToo movement in 2017 and the surge of personal narratives online from women and minority genders across the globe articulating their experiences of exploitation in different organisations of media, entertainment, academia, corporate sectors, public institutions and intimate spaces of home.
MeToo became a whisper network for women when the formal legal institutions and police system failed them. Even the internal mechanisms like ICC (Internal Committee Complaints) in various workplaces in India are more invested in preserving the organisation’s reputation over serving justice to complainants. The lack of evidence, along with adverse consequences for calling out people in positions of power, leads to the collective silence of women and gender minorities. Also, informally, the burden of proof falls on the complainants, or she/they is accused of disseminating false information in many workplaces. Thus, the anonymity online emboldened many women to reveal their experiences of abuse online. The MeToo movement received backlash for its extra-legal recourse to confessions and shaming tactics taken up against individuals and was dubbed by its critics as online lynching.
In India, the #MeToo movement resulted in revealing hierarchy and oppression in various organisations. The list curated by a then law student, Raya Sarkar, revealed the names of academicians who were called out for their multiple forms of abusive behaviour.
However, in India, the #MeToo movement resulted in revealing hierarchy and oppression in various organisations. The list curated by a then law student, Raya Sarkar, revealed the names of academicians who were called out for their multiple forms of abusive behaviour. In response, some well-known feminist scholars wrote an open letter persuading people to keep faith in the due process. This led to the online users challenging the prominent feminist scholars’ practices in well-known institutions and the extent of their radical positions when their male colleagues are involved. Therefore, these debates became possible due to online visibility and the diversity of opinions, which in turn exposed the hierarchy even within feminist circles.
The Reality behind Cancel Culture
The backlash against MeToo came with the argument that men were targeted through cancel culture, resulting in the loss of their occupation, disrupting their family lives and even pushing them to psychological distress. It is evident that after MeToo, there was also the proliferation of men’s rights activists and podcast speakers who started degrading women and accusing them of targeting men. The vulnerability of men is used to generate misogynist rants against women and minority genders instead of questioning hegemonic masculinity and oppressive structures in society. Though cancel culture is called out by people who operate in the ecosystem of the manosphere, blaming women for the targeting and distress experienced by men, it is also true that many men were silent and went underground in the initial years of MeToo without any legal consequences. They were later reinstated by the same or different organisations. Louis C. K., a popular stand-up comedian, stated how he was unaware of his behaviour and was accused of sexual misconduct in 2017.
This illustrates how everyday power relations and hierarchy can normalise harassment against women and gender minorities. He got an opportunity within a few months to perform at an event. The psychological distress is never experienced when people in positions of power engage in the exploitation of women and children, but naming and shaming have often been critiqued as retributive justice that goes against one of the feminist principles of restorative justice. The MeToo movement laid bare the normalisation of exploitative practices by those in positions of power.
Finding aperture of hope within the limitations of #MeToo online activism
The #MeToo movement came and fizzled out like many ad hoc protests online that attained unequal visibility and exclusion based on digital accessibility and social locations of many women and gender minorities. The #MeToo of the Global North countries received more visibility for the white women who remain employed within the formal sectors and industries in contrast to the invisibility of Black and migrant women in the United States. In the Global South, the exclusion is compounded by revealing the class, caste, region and the privileged geopolitical locations of the survivors. Taking these limitations into account, network activism online still provides a framework to fight against gender injustice.
The hashtags #NiunaMenos, calling out femicides against women in Latin America that started in 2015; and the women’s life and freedom movement in Iran in 2022 that generated digital visibility for many hashtags like #StopKillingUs and #WhyIStayed are all initiatives to talk about gender issues and the safety of children at a global level. The hashtags and the discourse surrounding them generated global awareness and linked gender issues not only within the confines of local regions and nation states but also showed the shared experience of gendered precarity and oppression. This often resulted in depersonalisation of the oppression through narrative storytelling to expand the personal to the political structural inequality and cultural bias. In the context of India, although network activism witnessed the bias of middle-class urban-based positionality of women who have access to the digital spaces, there are many instances when different forms of exclusion and biasness were called out online by activists and users by revealing selective outrage of certain incidents while invisibilizing injustices experienced by women from the oppressed community in rural areas, for example, the Khairlanjir massacre (2006), the Unna case (2017), the Hathras rape and murder incident (2020) and many other incidents of exploitation of marginalised women. Therefore, networked activism and visibility keep expanding gender justice by questioning the bias and privilege of visibility and media coverage given to certain incidents of injustice.
Mediated Visibility and Justice in the Unnao Rape Case
In recent times, the Unnao rape case has a series of hashtags, for example, #UnnaoRapeCase, #KuldeepSinghSengar, and #Unnao, where justice evaded the victim and his family when the Delhi High Court granted bail to the perpetrator. The 16-year-old woman, who is a survivor of sexual assault, started protesting at Jantar Mantar along with her mother and activist, Yogita Bhayana, after the Delhi High Court suspended the jail term of Kuldeep Sengar. The perpetrator with political clout and close ties with the ruling party, the survivor and her mother reposed their faith in the Supreme Court for justice. At the same time, videos and reels are shared where the users were highlighting the plight of the survivor and calling people to join the protest in Delhi. This was picked up by the mainstream media channels. On December 29, 2025, the Supreme Court stayed the Delhi High Court’s order of suspension of life sentence for the 2017 Unnao rape case. The Central Bureau of Investigation’s (CBI) plea resulted in the Supreme Court reviewing the order. The judges comprising the committee have raised concerns about this verdict and the interpretation of law favouring the release of Kuldeep Sengar, who is also accused of killing the survivor’s father. Digital networking results in solidarity across differences on issues of gender justice, where the micro acts and persistent calling out build into a broader wave of protests and even make visible the silence regarding certain issues in the periphery. The survivor’s pleas for justice were circulated by media channels and other users who took to social media to raise this issue and led many people to come in support of the survivor. Although the survivor’s perseverance resulted in gaining more support from people, it was the concerted effort of both online presence and offline participation that created solidarity and enabled collective and transformative actions.
