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Over a year after the #MeToo campaign swept across the world, leading to powerful men losing high-flying jobs from politics to the corporate world, women in Asia are still facing significant barriers to reporting sexual violence.
Sexual misconduct cases have emerged from China to India, but many Asian women face serious repercussions for speaking out - lawsuits, death threats or even the risk of jail time - hampering the movement's growth in the region.
In China, a former intern at the state broadcaster who wrote on social media this year about how she was groped and forcibly kissed by one of the country's most popular TV stars helped sparked a wave of online discussion.
The case has gone to court but it is not the man who was accused of sexual misconduct who is in the dock. Instead, it is the 25-year-old woman who levelled the accusations who has to defend herself from a civil defamation suit launched by the TV personality. He has denied the claims.
Similarly in India, where the #MeToo movement gained traction in October, two public figures - a junior minister and a veteran actor - also filed defamation suits against the women who accused them of improper behaviour.
Defamation is a civil matter in many countries but under Indian law, it can be classified as a criminal offence that can see those convicted jailed up to two years.
In Indonesia, a woman who recorded a lewd phone conversation of her former employer, who she accused of sexual harassment, was sentenced to six months in jail last month for breaking the country's controversial electronic information law.
Freelance journalist Shiori Ito, who helped put the #MeToo movement on the map in Japan, says she had to leave the country due to death threats after she went public with allegations of rape against a prominent TV broadcaster in 2017.
But even before that, she said she was subject to a great degree of humiliation for reporting the case - including police asking her to re-enact the scene of the alleged rape.
When prosecutors declined to bring charges in the case, which Ito alleges happened in 2015 when she was working as an intern for Reuters, she went public. This triggered a backlash - she was accused of being a prostitute and received online death threats.
"I was getting comments like ‘she should have been killed during the rape’ or ‘she should have been strangled to death’," said the 29-year-old, who started a movement dubbed "#WeToo" in Japan this year to mobilise victims of sexual harassment.
"Saying #MeToo out loud in Japan is still dangerous that's why we have to say #WeToo," Ito told me when we met at the recent Asian Investigative Journalism Conference in Seoul.
Even in Australia, one of the Asia Pacific nations with a better record on women's rights, every two out of three women have been sexually harassed at work but yet, only about a quarter have made a complaint, a survey of nearly 10,000 people showed last week.
The victims said they refused to pursue action because they feared reprisals and have no faith that they would get justice by filing a complaint, the survey by the Australian Council of Trade Unions found.
"We need to change the rules," the council’s president Michele O'Neil said, while calling for an effective mechanism that supports people who have been harassed, and does not punish them.
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