Breaking the secret of sexual abuse in the family: analysis of Twitter’s #Me- TooInceste movement

Abstract

Historically, sexual abuse of children within the family has been hidden and silenced. To break this taboo, the beginnings of the #MeTooInceste tweet went viral on the French Twitter platform in January 2021. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to understand how incest abuse has been addressed through the debate on social media. Likewise, from 14 to 21 January 2021, 15,496 tweets were collected for lexical analysis of the discourse and analysis of lexical similarity using the Reinert method enabled by the Iramuteq software. The results have made it clear that incest affects the individual and collective level. It has also been confirmed that the #MeTooInceste movement has served to break the silence of victims and create a space for society to recognize this invisible problem.