She stopped being a victim to become a survivor and then an activist.
Olimpia Coral Melo Cruz was called for months “the gordibuena [chubby and curvy] of Huachinango,” the gordibuena of Puebla –where she is from –.” This happened in a universe as amorphous as it is harmful like the Internet.
This all led to a reform of the Criminal Code, which now sanctions digital violence. This reform has been named after Melo; it is called the Olimpia Law.
According to Sin Embargo MX, it has been approved in 12 of the Mexico’s 32 states. Its discussion is pending in Mexico City.
The first pass of the Olympic Law took place in the state of Puebla, in the center of the country. It consisted in reforming the criminal code of that state: cyberbullying and the circulation of intimate material without consent became crimes typified as digital violence.
Olimpia Melo was only 18 when it all started. In 2013, she and her boyfriend recorded a video having sex. The video was leaked and it spread on whatsapp. Soon after that, it was all over the social media. “A local newspaper was selling like hotcakes with a front page saying that I, a girl with a future, was ‘burned on social media.’”
Melo told journalist Ana Gabriel Rojas of BBC Mundo: “Every day I got requests from men who asked me for sex on my social media profiles.”
Melo hid eight months at home, she tried to commit suicide three times – the last one was going to jump off a bridge and a friend saved her–. She didn’t know what resources to use, where to report what was happening.
Her mother’s understanding of her and the situation was the first step in experiencing sorority and taking in that she needed to partner with other women to get out of the hole and do something more far-reaching.
“My mother disconnected the telephone and the internet from the house. She protected me from the outside world. She let me know that I was safe in there (…) but people outside were talking about me. They came to knock on my door and say they had heard about the video,” she told BBC Mundo.
“They came to ask me to have sex with my dog, they came to ask me for videos of my sisters, they even came to ask me to record my mother when she was taking a shower and they said that in exchange they would withdraw my video,” she also explained El Sol de Puebla.
A friend showed her other women were also targets of bullying on the Internet, for whatever reason. This helped Melo know she wasn’t alone. She saw how they talked about a girl with Down syndrome as a sexual object.
So she decided to go to the public prosecutor’s office in Puebla to report what had happened to her. The official asked her to show him the video and then he laughed, Melo told BBC Mundo. “For the first time I saw someone watching the video in front of me, and I saw how he was watching me morbidly.” The official told her, she recalls, that according to the criminal code there was no crime, since she was neither drunk, nor drugged, nor raped.
About this, Melo told El Sol de Puebla: “(…) between remaining silent and remaining still, I said: it cannot be possible that there is no crime, this cannot be. I am already viralized, everyone knows me, and everyone knows every stretch mark of my body, every slice of my stomach, every part of me.”
The understanding of sorority became deeper: she summoned several women to draft a bill to reform the Criminal Code for Puebla. She didn’t know what that crime would be called, but she was thinking about of all women who had lived what she lived.
Four years went by since 2014, when she turned up for the first time at the Municipal Palace of Puebla; she heard whispers and received contempt even from a representative. The reform was passed in December 2018. The Code went on to punish, with sentences from three to six years in prison and an economic fine, “the disclosure, distribution, publication or request for the image of a person, partially or totally naked with erotic sexual content, by any means whether printed, recorded or digital, without the consent of the victim.”
The effect started multiplying in the rest of Mexico. The reform was passed with similar penalties in other states.
Olimpia Melo and a group of women created the National Front for Sorority (Frente Nacional para la Sororidad). They call themselves digital advocates. They speak of digital violence as one clear form of violence. “Our main objective is to promote, protect and guarantee people’s right to a digital and cybernetic life free of violence based on the protection of Dignity and Human Rights.”
Currently they are petitioning for the passing of the Olympia Law in Mexico City. The reform is being considered in the Mexico City plenary session of Congress, but they say that “some legislators are trying to displace us.”