Cristina Fallarás: building a collective memory of sexual violence

#Cuéntalo was born in April 2018, just after the verdict in the so-called “La Manada” trial. Can you present the movement and explain what led you to launch this hashtag?

In April 2018, the first verdict in the La Manada trial was made public. Five men had raped an 18-year-old woman during the San Fermín festivities in Pamplona. They had filmed everything and the evidence was overwhelming. And yet, the court concluded that there had been neither violence nor intimidation; only an assault of lesser gravity. The most serious thing is that the facts established in the judgment themselves described a rape, and yet they concluded that it had taken place without violence.

What struck me was not only the injustice. It was understanding how such a thing could be possible. If someone steals your wallet, it is called theft. If someone holds you captive, it is called kidnapping. But what was sexual violence called? The narrative of what sexual violence is belonged to a very restricted group, that of the elites. We had never had the channels to tell our own stories; neither the media, nor the police, nor the courts. On the contrary, these channels produce three things: denial of the facts, revictimisation and silence. There is something profoundly inappropriate about telling a assaulted woman to simply file a complaint, when you know that this entails economic, professional, symbolic and medical punishment.

That evening, I wrote on my Twitter account: “Sisters, they have stolen from us the story of who we are. It is up to us to say what sexual violence is.” I told several rapes I myself had suffered, and I launched the hashtag #Cuéntalo.

On the first night, a few dozen women responded. Three days later, the movement had crossed Spain’s borders, had become a viral phenomenon in Europe and Latin America, and in ten days, nearly three million women from more than 60 countries had testified.

Almost eight years have passed since this launch. What evolution do you observe in the way women share their testimonies?

The changes are immense. The first, and for me the most fundamental, is that society now accepts women’s testimony as a source of narrative. It took us years to achieve this, and some sectors, such as the justice system or the far right, continue to contest it.

Then women learned to talk to one another about violence and to recognise themselves in the experience of others. The phrases that come up most often in the messages I receive are: “don’t publish my name”, “this is the first time I’ve told it”, and “reading another woman’s testimony unlocked a memory in me” or “I discovered that what I am experiencing is violence”. This did not exist before; it is a collective learning process, and for me it is one of the most powerful effects of the testimonial movement. It generates mechanisms of identification that allow us to place violence where it must be placed.

There is also something that moves me deeply as a writer: syntax. The first women who wrote to me in 2023 had trouble synthesising. They were not used to telling their stories. Today, the accounts I receive have a capacity for distilling horror that leaves me speechless. A collective syntax of testimony is being built.

It should also be noted that the archive generated by #Cuéntalo is now accessible in all Spanish universities, in the faculties of sociology, anthropology and gender studies. And every 25 November, students from certain public high schools choose a testimony from the archive, print it out and hang it on the walls of their schools.

There is something even larger: this is the first time in the entire history of humanity that half of the population has the possibility of telling its story all together, by the millions. And when we finally have this capacity, we do not talk about fashion or romantic love. We talk about sexual violence. From Canada to Japan, from Greenland to South Africa, there is a collective awareness that sexual violence is the foundation of all oppression of women.

Ayax, a famous Spanish rapper, took you to court for defamation after you published anonymous testimonies from women accusing him. He is not suing the victims, but you, for giving them a voice. What does this strategy reveal?

It is very revealing. He is not suing the victims who name him directly, nor the journalists who describe his assaults. He is suing me, even though I did not even know who this man was when I published the testimony. He even accuses me of having created a parallel account of denunciations, which was in fact created by the victims themselves, in complete autonomy. It is a strategic dispute aimed at bringing down the very idea of testimony, at criminalising the channel rather than the facts. What surprises me is that this complaint was admitted.

In Spain, I am currently facing lawsuits worth close to one million euros, men who are suing me for damage to their honour. It is an economic punishment I cannot afford. But that is not all; I live with fear, not only for my physical integrity, but also for that of my family. The State Secretariat for Security offers me police protection when I speak publicly.

This kind of targeting of feminist activists is effective, and once they have you, they do not let go. I have known that since before #Cuéntalo: my first death threats in Spain came because of my activism for historical memory and against fascism.

#Cuéntalo is part of a global dynamic, alongside movements such as #MeToo in the United States or #BalanceTonPorc in France. What differences do you observe between these movements? What specific features does the Spanish case have, in your view?

The names say it all. Me too is an act of joining in, “me too”. Women who were very visible in public space were saying something, and others joined in by saying the same thing had happened to them. Balance ton porc is an accusation. Cuéntalo is something else: do not join in, do not point fingers. Tell your story.

Me Too, which is unquestionably the most important and the largest, and which emerged from the Argentine movement “Ni Una Menos” in 2015 before becoming a global model in 2017, had a structural problem. By calling for people to join in, it was refutable. Denialists could say that women were not saying “me too” because something had happened to them, but because they wanted to identify with public figures. It had an upward aspirational dimension that invalidated the archive.

My aim was for the basis to be each woman’s own story. Two women can describe exactly the same thing, but with a completely different language. And that can reveal two worlds of educational, cultural, generational or economic difference. That makes the story extend across all of society, and means it cannot be refuted by class or profile. And it is from this accumulation of irrefutable stories that collective memory is built.

What role does collective testimony play in the feminist fight against violence, and why is it so essential that women can tell what they have experienced?

The testimonial movement generates mechanisms of identification that allow us to tell our stories and, above all, to place violence where it belongs.

Often, a woman does not realise that what she is experiencing is violence until another woman has told her story before she does. What we do when we tell our stories is define what sexual violence is without waiting for the justice system to decide what is punishable.

If my boss sends me a kissing sound every morning when he arrives at the office, that does not constitute a crime. And yet, it can turn me into a woman with deteriorating mental health, who ends up earning less than her colleagues or being pushed out of her job. It can turn me into an impoverished woman. That is sexual violence, even if it is not codified. This is what the testimonial movement names and makes visible.

That is why we are building La Nuestra: a platform so that women have their own power to act, so that they manage their testimonies themselves, so that they can contact one another without depending on a single person. Our first crowdfunding campaign aimed to raise 90,000 euros and we collected 150,000 euros, a very encouraging start.

What we are doing is exactly what the state should do: give women a voice so that they can express the violence they have experienced, regardless of what the law considers punishable, and generate a collective memory of male violence that had never existed in the history of humanity. That memory now exists. And no one can take it away from us.

Interview by Cristina Asensi-Rodriguez, apprentice communications officer at the Fondation RAJA-Danièle Marcovici.