#Cuentalo is an online social movement that began on April 26, 2018 as a way for Spanish and Latin American women to publicly tell their stories of sexual harassment, abuse, and assault. The hashtag was born after a trial regarding the rape of a young woman by five men, known as “La Manada” at an annual festival resulted in the court clearing the accused of sexual aggression, and instead giving a lesser sentence for sexual abuse. This judgement led to a nationwide uproar, and opened the door for a national conversation about violence against women.
In light of this new wave of consciousness about sexual violence sweeping the nation, we decided to look at statistics from Spain detailing the frequency of sexual harassment among Spanish women based on their age group. According to this interactive graph, nearly 1 in every 2 women between the ages of 18-34 recall experiencing some form of sexual harassment in their lifetime.
One of the major differences between the #MeToo and #Cuentalo movements was the nature of the tweets that were being sent, and the harrowing stories that they told. While #MeToo in the United States was pretty self-explanatory, the women of Spain used the #Cuentalo hashtag to detail exactly the kind of abuse they had been subjected to. Some women tweeted stories of other women they knew who were no longer able to share their stories because they had died at the hands of their abusers. The bar graph below details the types of stories of sexual violence, ranging from intimidation to murder, that were shared through the 2.75 million #Cuentalo tweets.