Our Wave

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Empowering survivors of s*xual assault to safely share stories and messages of hope within an online community. Building a community to catalyze global change.

Our Mission
Our Wave is an online platform for survivors of s*xual assault to share stories, receive customized support, and join a community of understanding. While collecting stories and messages of hope, we seek to empower survivors, educate society, and strategize to develop smarter prevention methods. What we aim to solve
With the rise of the movement, more and more people are beginning to come to terms with their own history of s*xual violence and are beginning to feel empowered to share their stories to promote awareness and help others. Many fear publicly joining the conversation through public social media, however, due to fear of external exposure, as well as a variety of environmental factors. This leaves many stories untold, especially those originating in underserved populations. This highlights the need for an anonymous online platform for survivors to share their stories. The purpose of Our Wave story collection is to collect stories of struggle, strength, and healing to foster a community of hope for survivors. We believe that stories are powerful and have the ability to build understanding, cultivate empathy, and ultimately create change. To learn more, check out our award-winning film, Finding The Strength To Heal: https://discover.ourwave.org/exhibit/finding-the-strength-to-heal

09/29/2026

With prosecutors reopening the investigation at Cornell University, we want all survivors to know: we are here for you, always.

Our community platform is available 24/7. Share your story or artwork, and read other Survivor Stories, Messages of Hope, and Messages of Healing from people who understand.

You can also ask our trauma-informed experts a question, find curated resources, and read healing articles on our blog.

Visit the links in bio.💞

09/15/2026

In one week, we’ll be hosting a two-part, free webinar series on trauma-informed research with survivors.

This series will explore how trauma-informed principles can be applied throughout the research process to strengthen participant safety, choice, accessibility, and meaningful survivor involvement. It’s built for community organizations, survivor-serving professionals, advocates, and research partners who do this work every day.

➡️ Webinar 1.0, Foundations (September 22 at 1pm EST) covers research fundamentals, survivor and community engagement, study planning, recruitment, consent, privacy, compensation, and dissemination.

➡️ Webinar 2.0, Advanced Methods (October 20 at 1pm EST) focuses on applying these principles to specific methodological and operational decisions.

Both sessions are free, run 90 minutes, and can be attended together or on their own.

Leading the series is our Director of Research and Survivor Support, Laura Sinko.

Save your spot today for one or both sessions!

Register here: https://temple.zoom.us/meeting/register/C0FvOTyRQG2rgUEQQWIy3w #/registration

09/09/2026

In 2018, China’s hashtag drew nearly 4.5 million clicks in two weeks. Then it was blocked.

So survivors changed the sound. 米 is rice. 兔 is bunny. Said together, 米兔 (mǐtù) sounds almost exactly like “me too.” Some dropped the characters altogether and posted 🍚🐰 instead. reached around 5 million clicks before censors came for that too.

This week we’re spotlighting Chinese for our series. Four words, and the research behind them, in partnership with Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence (API-GBV). Four words, and the research behind them.

API-GBV publishes its Lifetime Spiral of Gender Violence in 20 languages. Chinese is the only one that appears twice, in Simplified and Traditional. A resource printed in one script doesn’t reach the people who read the other. That’s why every term in this post appears in both.

Our platform now holds more than 562,000 survivors across 80 countries. Read someone else’s story, or share your own when you’re ready.

你并不孤单. You are not alone. ❤️

https://community.ourwave.org/en

09/02/2026

🇵🇭 Filipino is the national language of the Philippines. Tagalog is the language it was built from, and one of 175 languages still spoken there.

This week we’re spotlighting Tagalog for our series. Here are five words, and the laws behind them, all framed by Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence (API-GBV)’s Lifetime Spiral of Gender Violence, a resource that traces gender-based violence across a woman’s whole life course.

Tagalog is the most widely spoken language at home in the Philippines, in 10.5 million households or roughly 40% of the country’s total. It’s also an ethnicity, the name is thought to come from taga-ilog, meaning people of the river.

31 stories, messages, and questions have reached us from the Philippines, part of a community of more than 561,000 survivors across 80 countries.

Hindi ka nag-iisa. You are not alone. Link in bio ❤️

08/17/2026

Last month, we co-organized the 2026 International Trauma Recovery Conference in Tokyo, with direct support from the United States-Japan Foundation／米日財団 🌏

This event brought together researchers, clinicians, and survivors to explore what trauma recovery looks like when it combines research, technology, and art across borders.

Three people from our own team took the stage. Laura Oman, our Director of Research and Survivor Support, spoke about how culture and gender shape healing, and how she uses photography to help survivors tell their own stories. Our Executive Director Kyle Linton facilitated a panel on trauma recovery and technology, along with Sachiko Kita, who directs Our Wave Japan.

Throughout the conference lobby, survivors’ own photography images were on display, as part of Nobuko Oyabu’s STAND Still exhibition. The aim of this exhibition is to reframe the victim label and showcase survivors’ own thoughts and worldview through photography.

The conference was a great success, with over 370 participants joining us! Thank you to every speaker, researcher, and survivor who made the day what it was.

Swipe through some of the photos from the day and stay tuned for the second part of our project with the US-Japan Foundation, which will include a digital art exhibit showcasing survivorship through art and digital expression shared between survivors in the U.S. and Japan!

08/12/2026

Non-consensual s*x wasn’t explicitly named a crime under Japanese law until 2023.

Last month, we co-hosted the International Trauma Recovery Conference in Tokyo with the MiStory network, a 13-country consortium studying trauma recovery. Ahead of it, we asked Dr. Sachiko Kita, Director of Our Wave Japan, to help us understand terms central to conversations survivors and researchers are already having across cultures.

This week’s post carries that conversation into our community, in partnership with the Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence (Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence (API-GBV)). API-GBV works nationally to advance culturally specific, language-informed responses to gender-based violence in Asian/Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) & Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) communities.

We carry this same value into our own platform. We’ve received 18 story submissions from Japan so far, part of a community of more than 555,000 survivors across 80 countries.

Have you ever struggled to find the right word for what happened?

Our community platform is here when you’re ready, no matter what words you have for it. ❤️ community.ourwave.org

08/05/2026

Some words carry generations of silence.

If your culture never gave you a word for what happened, it’s harder to name it, harder to ask for help, and harder to believe you’re not alone.

We’re exploring this further with a new weekly series, Speak It to Defeat It. Together with TayTalks 🌷 we’re diving into one culture and one language at a time, looking at what gets said, what doesn’t, and why that matters for how survivors heal.

The words available in one language may not carry the same weight in another, and naming that gap is a first step toward closing it.

Our community has shared stories from 79 countries so far, in 11 different languages, from Arabic to Yoruba to Japanese. This series is our way of slowly working through more of them, one culture at a time.

Our community platform is always open, whenever you’re ready to share your own story.

community.ourwave.org

07/29/2026

Most platforms show survivors the same list of resources, no matter who they are or what they've been through. We've been trying to change that.

Resource matching means connecting each survivor to support that actually fits their situation, identity, and location. We've made more than 269,000 resource referrals to a community of 562,000+ people across 79 countries, and along the way we learned that reach isn't the same as fit.

In 2024, we started filtering resources by country. But we've only built vetted coverage in 28 of the 79 countries where survivors reach us, and location alone doesn't tell us what someone needs.

This year, we moved to semantic matching. Instead of relying on location alone, our system reads the meaning in a survivor's own words to surface resources that fit their story. Every resource is still vetted by a person before it enters the system, and every match is monitored after.

But there’s still more to solve. A survivor in crisis needs a hotline first, before anything else. A q***r survivor needs resources that affirm who they are, not just ones that name the harm. We're building both into our next phase.

Read our full article about resource matching: https://www.ourwave.org/en/post/survivor-resource-matching

Working on survivor resource infrastructure in a country we don't cover yet? We'd love to connect: https://www.ourwave.org/en/partner

07/16/2026

Lani joined the Our Wave team in May 2026 as a UX Researcher!

Since then she’s been auditing the qualitative feedback tools on our community platform and exploring trauma-informed best practices in digital design.

“I am professionally committed to privacy-by-design and I’m energized the challenge of being responsive while simultaneously staying out of the way.”

Lani is a graduate student training in library science and studying Human-Computer Interactions at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Data & Information Science. She also works at a local outdoor store.

Welcome to the team Lani and thank you for all your hard work so far! 🌊

07/14/2026

There’s no trauma-informed standard for how AI should respond to survivors of s*xual violence. Not for crisis response, not for privacy, not for the tone of the answer itself.

Survivors are already asking AI chatbots questions that might have taken years to say out loud. At least 1 in 4 people surveyed (a nationwide sample of 645 people, including 259 survivors of s*xual assault) are turning to tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to process what happened to them.

At the same time, how people find information online is shifting fast. Google’s AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly users in its first year, and people click through to the original source just 8% of the time when an AI summary shows up in search results. That one AI-generated answer might be the only answer a survivor sees.

We’re in early conversations with academic researchers and survivor-serving organizations to design a benchmark that tests how today’s most-used AI chatbots respond to survivors.

Read the full piece and the rest of our Intentional By Design series: https://www.ourwave.org/en/post/are-ai-tools-safe-for-survivors

If you’re a researcher or organization doing related work, we’d love to talk about partnering. Reach out: https://www.ourwave.org/en/partner

Sources:
NSVRC, “Bridging the Gaps” needs assessment: nsvrc.org/resource/bridging-the-gaps-needs-assessment-to-strengthen-services-for-survivors-of-s*xual-assault
Google, “Search IO 2026”: blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/search-io-2026
Pew Research Center: pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results

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https://www.ourwave.org/

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