By Andrea Gilbert

If you haven’t seen this hashtag going around somewhere on your social media, you’ve probably been living under a rock.

As for me, my Facebook homepage is filled with this post, in between the cat or food videos. It started with my sister posting it, and I felt for her because she has suffered a few sexual harassments in her life, the worst one (in my opinion) not so long ago. I started thinking a lot about this story and how it affected my sister, how it changed her. I think it changed her for the better, it gave her a push to be even more careful for others than she was before, and I admire that so much, I admire how she took something really hard that had happened to her and made a choice, she chose to change for the better and to never let that happen to anyone else as long as she could help it. So this is not a SCAB about me, this is a SCAB dedicated to all the women who have suffered sexual harassment, inspired by my big sis’ and how we (and when I say “we” I mean EVERYONE) can help each other.

See when I think of my sister, I remember something she did, not long after she’d been harassed, which I will forever look up to. Let me tell you her story.

She was on the train alone and she noticed that a man was chatting up the girl sitting on the opposite row from hers. She seemed very uncomfortable and the man was very insisting and was indeed harassing her mostly verbally but it was obvious that his intentions were crooked. He kept asking her where her stop was and where she lived to which the girl gave awkward answers to on purpose because she probably “didn’t want to be rude”. Rings any bells..? Definitely, does to me. Anyway, after a while, my sister decided she wanted to stand up for this girl so she got up went towards her and pretended they were old friends. The man was very obviously upset and started reprimanding my sister for interrupting them but she didn’t let him get away with it, she pretended that she was super happy to see her old friend and said it was normal for them to want to catch up. She stayed and sat with the girl keeping the conversation going so the man wouldn’t get the chance to be inappropriate anymore, which is already a pretty damn cool thing to do, but my sister didn’t stop there, she ended up asking the girl if she wanted a ride home to which the girl answered yes please, so she drove her home and thus made sure that the man would not be able to keep harassing this girl.

Moral of the story, let’s stand up for each other, people. And I’m saying “people” not just girls. We should all take inspiration from my sister (and anyone else who has the guts to stand up for others) and stand up for women who are in those situations because I could get worse and they might end up being the one sharing the hashtag “MeToo” as well.