Emily Atack opens up both her life and DM’s in her new, incredibly personal and eye-opening BBC Two film Emily Atack: Asking For It?
For the first time, Emily delves deep into her own story, unpicking things that have happened to her as a result of attracting unwanted sexual attention from a young age. She admits that throughout her life she has felt blamed for this negative attention and has been repeatedly told, ‘but you’re asking for it’.
During lockdown, the online abuse Emily received escalated dramatically and she began sharing this with her followers. Many of the women who follow her came forward to say it happens to them too, and that they also thought it was normal. In the film, she reaches out to some of the men who routinely send her sexually explicit content to try and understand their motives.
Emily meets with experts, including a sexual violence and abuse councillor and online safety campaigners, to learn why this has been normalised for so long and interrogates why the blame for unwanted attention is so often put on the victim.
