LN – Black & White challenge: What’s behind the viral challenge?

Only on Instagram, the #BlackandWhiteChallenge It harvested more than 1,000,000 publications to ask for justice and make gender violence visible. The challenge of the black and white selfie started in Turkey due to the increase in the amount of femicides, but it did not take long to go viral and spread worldwide.

Turkey is one of the countries with the highest amount of femicides, only in 2019 there were more than 500 cases, an average of more than one woman per day. But, one of the claims of Turkish activists is that there is no true number of how many are the women murdered and that they prevail the speeches that blame the victims.

What is the origin of this challenge? A Turkish activist, on the Instagram social network called “agirlhasnopresident”, which means “girl without a president”, was one of the promoters of this movement. She reposted a post by @beelzeboobz that says: “The government discovers the culprits but does not punish them, the Turkish government is not present and does nothing to stop this type of action.” The use of the filter responds to the way that photos tend to appear in the media every time a woman is killed.

Using the hashtag #ChallengeAccepted, “Accepted Challenge”, in a few hours women from all over the world joined, who began to publish on their social networks black and white photos of themselves. They do it as a symbol that any of them could be in the news someday as a request for justice for her death.

In the ArgentinaAccording to La Casa del Encuentro, in the last four months there have been 92 femicides and 71% were killed in their own homes. In addition, one in seven of these women had already made the complaint.

Many famous and local influencers joined the campaign and uploaded their photos with filters, such as Graciela Borges, Silvina Escudero, María Vázquez, Muriel Santa Ana, María Onetto, Julieta Prandi and Juana Repetto, among thousands of other women who want to make this fight visible. .