When the #MeToo movement exploded in 2017, it was not powered by a single PSA. It was powered by millions of individual sentences. “Me too.” Two words. But each carried a universe of specific experience. The campaign became the survivors.

“I used to run a domestic violence campaign with a black eye on a poster,” says Miriam Cole, a public health strategist in Chicago. “We got calls. But we also got silence. People saw trauma. They didn’t see themselves.”

In the sterile waiting room of a downtown clinic, a young woman flips through a pamphlet. On the cover is a stock photo of a somber person staring out a rainy window. The headline reads: “Know the Signs.” She puts it down.

In the 1980s, this worked. The AIDS crisis demanded visibility. In the 1990s, breast cancer awareness turned a pink ribbon into a global language. But over time, the megaphone grew muffled. Audiences developed “compassion fatigue.” A statistic like “1 in 4 women” becomes white noise after the thousandth viewing.

“We realized that the most effective awareness tool wasn’t a brochure—it was a chair in a circle,” says David Oyelowo, founder of the Speak Forward collective, which trains survivors to craft their narratives for public campaigns. “When a survivor says, ‘I didn’t report it for ten years,’ and 50 people in a room exhale because they thought they were the only one—that’s awareness. That’s the campaign.” But there is a razor’s edge here. For every powerful story that heals, there is a risk of exploitation.

And that, more than any ribbon or hotline number, is the beginning of awareness.