One in three women globally experience violence.
—World Health Organization
About NO!
NO! The Rape Documentary is a groundbreaking, Ford Foundation-funded, feature-length film released in 2006 that addresses sexual violence in Black communities, with a focus on the intra-racial rape of Black girls and women, survivor healing, and accountability.
Twelve years in the making, the film was produced, written, and directed by childhood sexual abuse and adult rape survivor Aishah Shahidah Simmons. NO! was ahead of its time. Predating the #MeToo movement, it stands as a foundational work in global conversations on sexual violence, survivor healing, and accountability.
The making of NO! was the cover story in the September 15, 1995 weekend portfolio of The Philadelphia Tribune, the oldest continuously published African American newspaper in the United States.
Produced, written, and directed over 12 years (1994 to 2006), the film centers first-person testimonies alongside scholarship, spirituality, activism, and cultural work by Black people in the United States.
NO! also examines how rape is used as a weapon of homophobia and calls for the prevention, disruption, and ending of sexual violence. It amplifies the urgent need for survivor-centered, non-carceral accountability.
The internationally acclaimed documentary features powerful testimonies from Black women survivors of rape and sexual assault who break silences and challenge taboos surrounding sexual violence within African American communities.
Black women and men violence prevention advocates, theologians, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and human rights activists offer critical analysis and tools to understand existing frameworks for addressing sexual violence, while also advancing transformative and abolitionist approaches to ending rape and sexual assault.
Impact, Awards & Global Reach
Through archival footage, music, dance, and performance poetry, NO! The Rape Documentary situates sexual violence in Black communities within a broader historical and cultural context. Performances by award-winning poets, the late Essex Hemphill, Samiya A. Bashir, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, take viewers on a journey from the enslavement of African people in the United States through the early 2000s.
The film has received multiple awards, including the Audience Choice Award and a Juried Award at the 2006 San Diego Women Film Festival, and the Juried Best Documentary Award at the 2008 India International Women’s Film Festival. It was also selected for the Open Frame Film Festival organized by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PBST) in New Delhi, India, and included in the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms 30-year archive of social justice films.
Available for streaming in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German, NO! continues to reach global audiences.
The film premiered in 2006 at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, prior to the application of Title IX to campus sexual assault cases in 2007 and more than a decade before #MeToo gained global recognition.
NO! stands as a precursor to later documentaries addressing sexual violence, including The Hunting Ground (2015), Surviving R. Kelly (2019), On the Record (2020), and We Need to Talk About Cosby (2022).
More than a film, NO!, along with its free, downloadable 100-page study guide and supplemental video, is an educational, organizing, healing, and activist tool.
Screenings & Distribution
Since 2006, NO! The Rape Documentary has been continuously screened and independently distributed to diverse audiences at film festivals, colleges, universities, high schools, correctional facilities, rape crisis centers, battered women’s shelters, and conferences across the United States and internationally, including:
Italy, South Africa, Spain, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Macedonia, Kosovo, Czech Republic, Moldova, Slovakia, Slovenia, Austria, Albania, Nepal, Bulgaria, Rwanda, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Jordan, Burkina Faso, Peru, Colombia, Guadeloupe, Venezuela, Brazil, India, France, England, Haiti, Guam, Tahiti, St. Thomas (U.S.V.I.), St. Croix (U.S.V.I.), Puerto Rico, Turkey, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Mexico, Cuba, and Germany.
DOWNLOAD the NO! FILM CREDITS | View the (1994-2016) photo gallery to witness the journey!!!
The Courage Fund: Inaugural Awardees Stephanie “Sparkle” Edwards and Aishah Shahidah Simmons in conversation with journalist Charles Blow at the Ford Foundation, October 2024
The Courage Fund’s inaugural awardees, Stephanie “Sparkle” Edwards and Aishah Shahidah Simmons, join journalist Charles Blow in a conversation about standing up in the face of adversity, in service of women and girls everywhere, particularly those impacted by gender-based violence.
The Courage Fund is an initiative led by National Book Award–winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Salamishah Tillet, artist Scheherazade Tillet of A Long Walk Home, and activist Ted Bunch of A Call to Men. The initiative works to support and empower Black women and girls to speak out against violence.