WHAT COMES AFTER AWARENESS?

The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is check my phone. I don’t get up from my bed until I’ve finished my fiveto 10-minute scroll on social media, catching up on everything I’ve missed overnight, from national news to random tidbits online.

- By MIKAELA VILLACORTA

On a typical day, my screentime runs from five to seven hours, most of which I spend on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. Beyond my common interests, like music, fashion and art, a key subject that my algorithm consistently surfaces is content about sexual crimes against women and children.

True crime has, after all, become a familiar type of online content, delivered in short, digestible clips, much like any other trend. But when stories of violence are consumed in this way, side by side with lighthearted videos from makeup tutorials, travel vlogs, and back-to-school hauls, it blurs the line between awareness and desensitization.

More often than not, these stories present incidents that have truly happened and keep happening in real life. Whether this is seen from accounts of news channels, influencers, or victims themselves, the never-ending stories of terror and violence only prove that crimes like this occur more than we think, all over the world, to women of all ages.

And by all ages, I mean a three-month-old baby from the Philippines as a victim of online sexual exploitation and a 97-year-old woman from Nigeria subjected to rape. At first, it was hard to continue doomscrolling or, better yet, go about my day, after watching or reading such harrowing content. It is never not a hard pill to swallow, reading about kids being robbed of their innocence through such heinous crimes done by strangers and even their own family, or women being mutilated, their bodies dumped in rivers or thrown off buildings.