Several years ago, when allegations against XXXXXX first came to light, I was in a script meeting for a children’s show. The writers and producers all chuckled sadly as they swapped stories of his inappropriate actions. It stunned me how casually they confirmed that this was all collective industry knowledge. It was my first taste of pressing up against the invisible web of rules I could not parse. It wasn’t group silence or ignorance but a series of deliberate phrases we all had chosen to use.

As women around the world gather to march, we could not let this moment pass without challenging some of the criticism of Promising Young Woman which we feel misses the central point – and, by extension, the reason why women’s rage is again bubbling towards boiling point.

Sexual assault is routine. It is happening to women in our country right now, this second. Those women are no doubt leaving their bodies, feeling unreal, narrowing their focus, experiencing a strange slowing of time. None of this means it isn’t happening. In fact, from a neurobiological standpoint, dissociation is good evidence that it did happen, and of the deep and lasting harm it has caused.

University students have a right to know the scale of sexual misconduct as an issue on their campus that pertains to their mental and physical wellbeing. Prospective students, as well as current ones, should be able to fully and easily inform themselves of the track record of the institutions where they will spend a significant portion of their time studying, and in some cases working or living.

As critics have pointed out, the social media ‘movement’ #MeToo hasn’t really moved much since October last year. Global conversations on sexual assault notwithstanding, we’re stuck with personal narratives, an emphasis on high-profile individuals, and little by way of a broad, institutional challenge to coalesce around. Despite this, it’s hard not to think that we might be in the midst of a generative time for new, critical insights on sexual violence.

During these deployments – many of which lasted for over five years – covert officers lived and organised alongside activists, passing information back to their superiors that would later thwart the actions they were helping to organise. Behind the sensationalism is the personal trauma of the officers’ former partners, and the story of their long struggle to attain some kind of justice.

I am still learning how to protect my own consent – sometimes the hard way – but I am grateful for the ways in which doing sex work has helped me to clarify and articulate my boundaries, at work and beyond. I wish I could share what I have learned with 16-year-old me. I would tell her that refusing to partake in sexual acts is an inalienable right that requires no explanation. I would tell her that for someone to deny your right to consent – whether it be through physical force, guilt, or discriminatory laws – is indefensible.

Earlier this year I was part of a process that detailed three incidents of sexual harassment perpetrated by a fellow poet. The incidents involved three women writers who all experienced similar harassment on the same night by the same man at a literary event. Had these incidents occurred in isolation and the four of us not spoken and mobilised, these incidents would not have been reported.

While the term stealthing may not be preferential, it isn’t the first time that movements have had to reclaim terminology in order to initiate their own conversations. From the feminist pop culture magazine titled Bitch, to The Vagina Monologues acrostic classic ‘Reclaiming Cunt’, to the now common usage of the term queer in the LGBTQI community – as Paul Baker, a professor of English Language at Lancaster University in the UK says, ‘control language and you control the society.’

For someone dealing with the grief, shame and anger after a sexual assault, it can be especially hard when one’s peers and relatives are the ones choosing not to believe them. I know this because I write from the point-of-view of a woman who has not been believed about being raped, and also as someone who chose not to believe another.

These (alleged) rapes are only known about because the women became pregnant. For a large part of a woman’s menstrual cycle the chances of pregnancy are almost zero. So a number of women actually pregnant following rape strongly suggests a much larger number being raped but not becoming pregnant.

You are fifteen when your friend’s classmate is abducted. She was walking home from your favourite shopping centre where you like to go and hang out on Thursday nights with your friends. Her picture is all over the news for a few weeks and it’s labelled a Teen Tragedy. Some boy was bothering her at work all the time. She asked him to stop but he didn’t so she had to quit her job. People say she probably ran away with him.

The Royal Commission has made over 1600 referrals to authorities, including police, but most perpetrators will never face justice in a criminal court. Survivors who wish to achieve redress are therefore only able to do so civilly under personal injury law, which is a poor fit for historical trauma.

What Brock Turner did was horrific, abominable, almost unthinkable. But we must not allow our natural and appropriate disgust at his act blind us to the evidence about what works and what doesn’t work, if we want to prevent him and others from doing it again, and if we want to afford victims the best opportunity to heal.

It is certainly fair that someone like Amber Heard should be believed about allegations of violence in the hope that those in similar positions feel empowered to do the same. But Heard is a wealthy, well-connected woman; how similar are these positions likely to be? It is well and good on one level to support survivors of violence by bringing their experience into the mainstream using celebrity culture, but there is a need to go beyond this.