Why Women Around the World Are Posting Black and White Pictures

It’s not just a trend.

Over the past couple of days, you might have seen Instagram being flooded with black and white images of women.

Everyone from influencers to major celebrities like Jennifer Aniston, Khloe Kardashian, Reese Witherspoon are posting a black and white pictures of themselves, followed with a hashtag “#challengeaccepted”.

How Did It Start?

The hashtag “challenge accepted” initially started in 2016 as a way to raise awareness for cancer. It has also served as a medium for women to support each other via the hashtag and as a positive reinforcement.

The challenge circulated like a conventional chain mail. Women who take part in this campaign post a black and white picture of themselves, then nominate other women and ask them to do the same.

The movement already has more than 6 million posts on Instagram.

Why the Sudden Upsurge?

There are many speculations to what caused the recent upsurge. Seems like everything came up together at the same time to cause this sudden up-rise to the hashtag.

1. Istanbul Convection and Femicides in Turkey

The recent surge was a result of a campaign started from Turkey as a form to protest against violence against women.

Turkey has one of the highest rate of femicides in the world and it got even worse during the covid-19 pandemic. Turkey had recorded about 500 femicides in 2019 alone.

The movement started because the government of Turkey is attempting to abolish certain aspect of the “Istanbul Convetion” which protects women from domestic violence.

The movement was started by women in Turkey as they could not tolerate seeing Black and White images of murdered women everyday in the news media.

The protest also took an uproar when Pınar Gültekin, a 27 year old Turkish women suddenly went missing and was found dead in the woods 5 days later.

2. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez House of representatives speech

After Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s speech in the house of representatives where she called out representative Ted Yoho for making sexist remarks against her.

Women around the world started to support her and the hashtag also turned into a way of showing solidarity among women through out the world.

This helped boost the popularity of the hashtag even more.

Lastly

Although it is great that the internet has build this platform where women and men throughout the world can support each other and share their stories.

I think it is also important to know how the hashtag started and what it’s purpose was.

It seems like most of the people don’t even know why they are posting the picture. To most of the people, They are just following the trend as they do with all the trends.

This has caused people to misinterpret its purpose.

If all the post were followed by a raised voice regarding the femicides that occur in Turkey. It certainly would have been a tremendous help to fight against the issue.