27-year-old activist Amber Amour live blogs assault on Instagram

 One could never imagine what it feels like to be a victim of rape or sexual assault unless one has lived it. So many emotions likely come to mind. Fear. Pain. Guilt. Shame.

When 27-year-old activist Amber Amour was sexually assaulted in November 2015, she did what some would say was unconventional: she live blogged it on Instagram.

Posting a raw selfie of herself in tears, lying naked on the floor of a Cape Town, South Africa hostel, Amour shared her story of sexual assault just minutes after it happened.

"It was only a few minutes ago but sometimes these things happen so fast it's hard to remember all the details...," she captioned with the picture before she goes in great detail about her visit and the man who allegedly abused her.

A man she identifies as Shakir, she says, wanted to get with her. The two had been acquainted through a mutual friend. Amour says she kissed the man once, but informed him that it was "bad timing" because he was drunk. After agreeing to take a shower at his hostel because her hot water wasn't working, Shakir, she says, attacked her.

"As soon as I got in the bathroom, he forced me to my knees. I said "stop!" but he just got more violent," she writes. "He lifted me up and put his penis in my vagina. I asked him to stop, again, as I began to cry. When he shoved it in my ass, that's when I passed out."


This wasn't Amour's first time being sexually assaulted. She was raped at the age of 12, which prompted her to found her campaign "Stop Rape. Educate."

“Here I was, telling survivors every single day that they should speak up… I knew I had to practice what I preached,” she said in Marie Claire UK. “So the first thing I did was take a picture and write a post, describing what had happened.”

“It was almost an intuitive thing,” she added. “I was still in the bathroom — in the crime scene. I don’t even think I’d stood up. I just typed and typed.”

Amour was met with sharp criticisms online from those who victim blamed her. She was told that agreeing to shower with a man was an open invitation for being assaulted.


“No matter what a person does, it is not an invitation for rape,” Amour fired back in another photo caption. “It doesn’t matter if I kissed him. It doesn’t matter if he was drunk. It doesn’t matter if I said yes to a shower. I never said he could get violent with me. I never said he could make me bleed. I never said he could rape me. But still, that’s how the scene went down.”