Sexism in Abduction Cases

Recently, I read an article detailing the story of a 16-year old girl who was missing for several days. An older man had abducted her and kept her in the back of his truck, while also having sexual images of her on his phone. Luckily, another driver on the road was able to call for help because they saw the girl making a hand sign that signaled distress from the man’s truck. The symbol is typically used for domestic abuse victims to show that they are in trouble without having to verbally say it out loud. It’s pictured here:

                      

The symbol was created by the Canadian Women’s Foundation, but was largely popularized on TikTok. What surprised me most about this article was the amount of backlash the unnamed girl in the story faced for using this symbol. A lot of online posts I saw criticized her for using the symbol, saying she only knew it from TikTok, and that that somehow delegitimized her ability to use it. A lot of other people said that they wouldn’t have recognized the symbol at all if they were driving around, implying that the symbol is useless anyway.

Anything a teenage girl enjoys to do, like maybe viewing TikTok, is scrutinized in some way. If a girl likes doing makeup, she’s too fake, and if she likes skateboarding, she’s just trying to fit in with the boys for attention. This mentality clearly has some extremely harmful real world applications. In this situation, the focus on the real issue, that an older man abducted her and likely sexually exploited her, is moved to making fun of a girl for learning something from TikTok. I believe the criticism this young girl faced was because of a combination of sexism and ageism, since people don’t like to accept that social media is a powerful and legitimate way to spread life-saving information.

What also struck me was the extreme double-standard at play. If this situation were to happen to a man, he would have been lauded for having instinctual survival skills and acting quickly and accordingly to get out of a dangerous situation. No one would care that he learned the symbol from TikTok. Yet, a woman who does the same thing is somehow getting hate. Overall, this situation was particularly horrifying for me to read, and to see that people were not giving the love and sympathy she deserved was wildly upsetting.