Turkey woke up with the shock of Özgecan Aslan’s murder on February 11, 2015. At a time when femicide numbers were increasing daily, Elveris thought it was therefore necessary to take a step to convince Turkey’s society that women were also experiencing sexual harassment and discrimination. Three days after the murder, she sent the tweets on the right. When her friends started to share stories of harassment and discrimination, she retweeted them. The next day, #sendeanlat (meaning “tell your story”) almost “exploded”. For four days, women from all over Turkey revealed their harassment experiences with 300,000 original tweets. This figure later reached one million with all the subsequent retweets.

#sendeanlat has become a platform where women have shared their experiences and have made the harassment problem visible. While Elveris wanted to empower women, she also wanted them to show solidarity with each other because before, the problem couldn’t even be talked about. Thus #sendeanlat turned into a sharing exercise of painful experiences and even group therapy. In a way, the tweets revealed an inventory of harassment while sharing tactics employed by women. The women saw that they were not alone.

It was clear that sexual harassment was not just an incident taking place on public transport, like how it happened to Özgecan Aslan, but also occurred in schools, streets, workplaces, families and even in public buildings. The issue was about womanhood and how women had the same problems regardless of their ethnic origin, religious beliefs and class.

All of this happened a year and a half before the #metoo hashtag went viral when the allegations of sexual assault against Harvey Weinstein surfaced in October 2017. Even today, tweets are posted with the hashtag #sendeanlat , and webpages and blogs are set up under this tag. Social scientists continue to write thesis and articles on the subject analysing tweets and conducting interviews with Elveris.