They told me to change my clothes. I changed the law instead.
Transcriber: Millie Jackson
Reviewer: Silvia Monti
I’m Gina, and I’ve lost 23 debit cards.
I don’t mean to, I’m just
an easily distracted person.
I’ve been known to show up
to events on the wrong date,
I always miss my Tube stop,
and I cannot for the life of me
wake up in the morning
without feeling personally attacked.
I’m also young, I’m female,
I’m working class,
and I’m not particularly academic -
I kind of was average in school.
And I think these are all
some of the reasons why
I probably never felt like I could really
‘make a difference’ growing up.
But it turns out,
with long-term things,
I’m actually pretty good,
with big ideas.
I might be the person
who lost 23 debit cards,
but I’m also a law changer.
When I was 25, I founded and ran
the national media and political campaign
to make upskirting illegal.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)
You may have heard that story by now,
but if you have, it will have been
in clickbaity titles
like ‘I fought the law and won’,
that kind of thing.
The reality of it is,
it is actually the most difficult
and uncomfortable period of my life.
And I would like to take this opportunity
to share that story with you now,
as it actually happened,
without the fierce-feminist
shiny wrapping of it,
but with some of the biggest lessons
we can learn along the way
and for the last time.
In July 2017, I was at a festival called
British Summer Time in Hyde Park.
Me and my sister were
in a crowd of 60,000 people
waiting for The Killers to take the stage,
when a group of guys
started hitting on us.
One of the guys was making
loads of gross jokes
and generally being really weird
and harassing us,
and we asked him to leave us alone
multiple times, but he wouldn’t.
Five minutes later,
I felt them all laughing at me.
One of the guys
was standing in front of me,
so I peered around
to see what he was doing.
He was on his phone,
and he’d been sent a really well-taken
photograph of someone’s crotch
that was taken up their skirt.
I knew it was me straight away.
I grabbed the phone, and I started crying,
and I held it up and was kind
of yelling about what he’d done.
And then a couple of people
in the crowd helped me get away,
and I ran through that crowd
holding his phone,
with him chasing me,
which was literally terrifying.
I managed to get a security guard,
who protected me and called the police.
When the police came,
they separated me and the guy,
and they said this to me,
‘You should be able
to go to a festival at 30 degrees,
wear a skirt, and this not happen to you.’
But they also said,
‘We’ve had a look at the photo.
It shows more than you’d want it to show,
but it’s not a graphic image.
If you’d chosen not to wear knickers,
we could do something about this.
But you did, so you
won’t hear much from us.’
They told the guy to delete the photo,
so my evidence was gone,
and then they told us
to enjoy the rest of our night.
And I tried to,
but I felt humiliated and sad,
and I knew the guys were probably
just carrying on with their night,
having a great time.
I went home, and a few days later
I got a call from the police,
and they told me my case was dropped.
And I swear to God,
when I put that phone down,
something inside me sort of snapped.
I’ve been dealing with sexual harassment
for as long as I can remember,
and I’d been brushing it off,
and I was so over it.
I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a law
covering this in some way.
So I started to try to look into it.
Everything I read was written
by politicians and law-makers,
academic people who spoke with jargon,
they don’t speak like me.
I didn’t really understand
what they were fully saying.
So I looked into law,
and I thought I’d found
that upskirting was not a sexual offence,
but I thought I must have got it wrong
because I’m not academic.
So I asked a friend of mine who was
a law student to look into it for me.
And she said, ‘You’re right.’
I had found that upskirting,
the act of taking non-consensual photos
or video up someone’s clothing,
was not a sexual offence
in England and Wales,
but it had been in Scotland for 10 years.
We ask a lot from
victims of sexual violence.
We question them,
we hold them to a higher standard
sometimes than we do perpetrators
in the moments after an incident.
But I had done everything asked of me.
I’d got witnesses, I’d kicked up a fuss,
I had a photo, the phone.
I even handed the guy into the law,
and apparently it couldn’t help me.
And this is where we learn
our first lesson:
Women and marginalized genders
who often deal with sexual violence
shut their mouths
because we make it harder
for them when they’re open.
We have to stop acting
like they’re navigating
some simple and perfect system.
They’re not.
They’re navigating one that’s working
against them a lot of the time.
You see, when sexual harassment happens,
there are one of two options.
Number one, you brush it off,
you shut your mouth.
It happens, it is what it is.
Number two, you do something about it,
literally anything.
Because it’s not funny,
it’s not a joke, it’s humiliating,
and someone should do something about it.
I can tell you right now
that I’m good at number one.
Women and marginalized genders
are good at number one.
We’ve been doing number one
for as long as we can remember,
and we are really, really
bored of number one.
Number one, I think,
has affected me more than I know.
Because of number one,
when I watch news stories
about this stuff,
I start crying out of nowhere.
When someone tells me a story
about sexual harassment,
it somehow partly feels like it’s mine
because of number one.
And because of number one,
I have struggled to articulate
this problem for such a long time.
Because I’d shut my mouth about it,
and I didn’t have the language.
I’m frustrated that year after year,
number one seems like our best option.
But what about number two?
OK, well, number two isn’t something
that people like me do really.
Number two is for brave people,
literally amazing people,
people who are in power,
people who didn’t scrape by in school,
people who have one debit card, I’d say.
People who wrote those documents
I struggled to read.
But you see, I couldn’t forget it,
the upskirting thing,
because for me it felt somehow
possible to forget, for instance,
the hand that had been on my bum
on the Tube a year earlier,
because that hand was no longer there -
not easy, but possible.
But I couldn’t forget the upskirting thing
because they still had the photos.
They probably still do now.
It felt impossible for me to forget,
I think, because they did straight away.
I don’t think they even thought
they’d done that much wrong.
And therein lies our problem.
A few days later, while I was at work,
I put up this photo of me
and my sister at the festival
that happened to have
the guys in the background.
I thought, ‘The law can’t help me,
the police can’t help me,
but maybe social media can.’
And I asked people to share it
and identify the guys.
And then Facebook got in contact with me
and told me I’d violated
their community guidelines.
Apparently, me putting this photo up
constituted harassment against the guys,
but them taking photos up the skirt
and sharing them, no.
I was incandescent with rage
at this point.
Every single safety net that was meant
to have caught me hadn’t,
and the one thing I worked in
and had done for years
that was about democracy,
community and human connection -
social media -
had also rejected me.
You remember what I said about a system
that’s working against you?
Everything at this point
is forcing me back to number one,
to brush it off, to forget
about it, ‘it is what it is’.
I think when Facebook censored me,
I actually just got angry enough
that number one stopped being an option.
And I’m not really embarrassed
about the anger either
because here’s our second lesson:
Anger is a very normal response
to having your human rights compromised.
That’s important to say.
We have to stop using it
to delegitimise people,
with ‘angry feminist’
or ‘angry Black woman’,
all of these stereotypes.
People are allowed to be angry
about this stuff.
And we have to hold space for them there.
We have to realise it’s not about us.
I’d been put up with, I don’t know,
being shouted at from cars.
I’d had my bum grabbed in bars.
I had a stalking case for two years
against a guy from school
that ended in nothing.
When I was 19 and I worked
at a rowdy student bar,
a security guard,
who was employed to protect me,
felt my boobs ‘to see
if I was wearing a stab-proof vest’.
I was angry that every woman I know
has dealt with sexual harassment,
and I was angry enough for the first time
that number two became the only option -
to do something about it,
literally anything.
So I started a social media campaign.
I thought, ‘OK, in work,
if I can start a campaign to make people
care about whisky, for instance,
I can do it with something like this
that actually matters.’
I’d launched a petition,
I wrote Facebook ads,
I did editorials,
and that’s when I realised this:
Social media is the single
most important democratising tool
we’ve ever had in social change.
It can be used by anyone,
at any time, for good.
And traditional institutions
really don’t understand it,
so you can use that.
Almost as soon as I started
asking the question,
‘Why is upskirting not a sexual offence?’
people started answering.
My DMs became full of stories.
Young girls telling me about pictures
being taken up their skirts on the Tube.
Trans women telling me that people’s
obsession with their genitals
had lead to them being
victimised with upskirting.
I had messages from teachers
telling me young boys
were coming up with plans
to get pictures of the teachers together.
And I got messages from Japan,
where it is such a problem
that they have redesigned phones
so you can’t turn off
the camera shutter sound.
So women are ‘alerted’
it’s happening to them.
Then I started getting messages from kids.
And they were all coming
from the same place, I recognised -
a school in South London
where the teacher had been upskirting
the kids for months.
They found thousands of photos,
but they couldn’t convict him
because what he did didn’t constitute
a criminal offence under that current law.
These kids who are messaging with me,
pleading with me to do something,
couldn’t even vote.
They have no democratic
voice whatsoever.
But social media gave them
a direct line to me.
And thank God it did
because that was when I realised
this is way bigger than me and my case.
And instead of me
standing up and being like,
‘Someone should do something’
and pointing fingers,
I thought, ‘Alright,
I’ll try and do something.
I don’t know how to do it,
but I’ll try and change the law.
I’ll give it a go because maybe
I’ll make it easier for someone who can.’
Honestly, I genuinely think I just needed
somewhere to put my frustration.
And that makes sense to me now.
Because here’s our next lesson:
Action really is the cure for fear.
With these things, fear and frustration
really fester in you,
but taking an action, even if it’s small,
can metabolise that back into power again.
That’s what it did for me.
The first thing I did
when I thought about changing the law
was I googled, I literally wrote,
‘How does one change the law?’
and nothing came up.
And I realised I was going to have
to figure this out on my own.
I also realised that social media
and shouting about it on there
was great for awareness,
but it wasn’t going to change the law.
I had to get really clever and strategic.
And to do that, I had to be
really honest with myself.
I’m good at campaigning,
I can motivate people,
and I understand this issue
more than anyone, really,
but I don’t really understand politics,
and I don’t really understand the law.
And those are two pretty big
pieces of the puzzle
if you’re going to go into politics
and change the law.
So I needed to find someone who did,
and I had to show them
that I was really serious.
So I went mainstream with the campaign.
I packaged up the numbers
from social media,
and I started talking
to TV producers and editors
showing them there was conversation
happening online.
The first piece of media I did
was Good Morning Britain.
Piers Morgan was sadly not in that week,
but I did get to sit opposite
a female police officer,
who told me that the police had
‘more important things to deal with’
and that I should wear trousers.
At the height of those media appearances,
I used all that publicity,
and I started contacting law firms,
showing them my proven theory on the law
and all the public support I had.
And then three days after I started
that, I found Ryan Whelan,
who was a 29-year-old lawyer.
He was a human rights fanatic,
he was unjaded by the industry,
and he was a complete political nut.
And we got to work together.
We started creating a political strategy
and a media strategy
that complemented each other.
We looked at the Scottish Law,
and he created the new
legislation we needed here.
And then we went and got
the best legal authorities in the UK
to corroborate that and stand behind it.
We did that because it meant
when we went into Parliament,
we were making it
as easy as possible for MPs.
We were just giving them
a solution, not a problem.
We met with MPs from all parties.
That was really important to us.
And that’s because this wasn’t
a Labour issue or a Conservative issue.
It was a human issue.
And that ’s when I learnt this:
Human rights aren’t about party politics.
Party politics is a game, I’ve seen it.
Human rights are about values and morals.
So instead of everything
being left or right,
upskirting being a ‘lefty issue’,
let’s start looking up and down more.
Who is society harder on?
Who is society easier for?
If we start doing that,
we’ll start getting work done.
After months of meetings,
we’d kind of built an army of MPs
in those four walls,
and we tabled a private member’s
bill to change the law.
A year of politics ensued.
That bill was killed and objected to
by an MP called Christopher Chope,
who, when I asked him why,
told me, and I quote, ‘He hadn’t read it.’
He said he objected on principle,
but that was disproved.
If you ask me, he saw this as trivial -
a lot of people do.
And he also didn’t like the young girl
coming in and getting a bill through,
when he’s tabled 47 of his own.
That’s politics.
There are good people in there, though.
The next day, me and Ryan met
with the Justice Minister, Lucy Frazer,
and we tabled a government bill
that couldn’t be objected to by MPs.
We saw that bill through for a year -
a year that I was fraught with nerves
that this thing we’d almost done
might fall at the last hurdle.
But thankfully, January 2019 came,
and me, and my family, and Ryan
squeezed in to the gallery
at the House of Lords,
and we watched them
pass our law unamended,
practically as we created it.
And that’s the kind of law you get
when it’s driven by someone
who has lived the problem.
(Cheers)
Thanks.
(Applause)
Then I went to the pub,
and I drank my weight in red wine,
and I cried a lot.
And then I danced to ’90s pop,
and I ate pizza with my mum
because that’s survivors deserve.
(Applause)
In the eight months
after we outlawed upskirting,
there had been one report to police
almost every single day.
We prosecuted 10 men by Christmas.
One was a convicted paedophile
who got two years in prison.
Another was a man who was seen filming
under a 16-year-old girl’s skirt
at a supermarket,
and when police arrested him, they found
250,000 indecent images of children.
This law isn’t catching upskirters.
It’s catching sexual offenders,
predators, paedophiles.
And that’s because of this next lesson:
All misogyny and sexual
violence is connected.
Therefore, all of it is the problem,
none of it is trivial.
We have to remember that.
The coverage that followed
the law change was lovely.
It was really powerful and positive.
And I needed that,
we needed that, I think.
It felt good to have someone
who took on the establishment,
who was normal and won.
But I started to feel weird
because the two years campaigning
wasn’t actually like that.
This was what campaigning was like.
And I will cry, but it’s OK
because not crying
isn’t about power anymore.
You can still be powerful and cry.
And I got online abuse, rape threats,
slut-shaming for two years.
I still get them now.
And I want you to read these
as if you’re reading them
about someone you love.
Because -
(Sniffs)
We have to stop calling them trolls
because they’re not.
They’re the people who work
in coffee shops that serve you coffee.
They work in your offices,
they’re everywhere.
They’re people who are so angry
about a woman standing up for herself
that they will threaten her with rape.
And there’s a lot of them.
And I know you don’t want to hear this
because we never do,
but they’re all guys.
(Cries)
No doubt when this video goes up
on YouTube, I’ll get more of them.
And among the nice comments,
the supportive ones - because there are -
and the hard ones,
there will be one phrase
that comes up again and again.
It’s not the scariest I’ve dealt with,
but it is the most effective
at derailing this important conversation.
It will say, ‘Not all men.’
And to that I’ll say this,
‘No, not all men, but too many.’
Too many men, for some reason,
feel entitled to women
and marginalized genders' bodies.
Too many men, whether
through action or inaction,
are perpetuating a culture of sexism
that breeds inequality
and that leads to violence.
And if you want to use
the phrase ‘Not all men’,
how about we use it like this?
‘Not all men are calling out their friends
when he says something to a woman
he would never say to a guy.
Not all men are looking up these phrases,
learning what rape culture really is,
how misogyny really operates.
And no, not all men are perpetrators,
of course they’re not.
But all the ones who aren’t
should be solving this with us.
Because maybe if they were,
we’d be living in a society
where when I talk to guys
or male politicians about sexual violence,
they want to solve it with me
more than they want to prove
that they’re not the problem.
Maybe if we were living in that world,
when someone upskirts me
and takes photos without my consent,
I don’t have to almost lose it,
creating a law that should
have already been there for me.’
Because here’s the thing.
When good men do engage with this work,
when they really want to solve this,
and they meaningfully engage, it works.
Without Ryan as my ally,
demanding a seat for me in Parliament,
amplifying my voice, listening to me -
the law wouldn’t have changed.
And there are good men
that I know and love
reading the books on gender,
feminism, racism.
They’re doing the work,
they’re going to the events and listening.
They’re not waiting for a woman
to explain this stuff to them.
But from where I stand, there’s too few.
And we need more of you.
And that brings us onto our final
and most important lesson:
Communities that are oppressed
should not be left to dismantle
the thing that’s been built against them.
You have to listen to your privilege,
learn about it and use it
and assist them in that fight.
Look, I know listening to this is heavy,
I get it, I’m tired too.
But I’m also positive,
and I’m strong like you are.
And I genuinely believe we can solve this.
Every day in this work
I get to see amazing people
who are pushing to make
the world a better place.
I see it all the time.
Hate and intolerance
are very loud, they scream.
But good people, compassionate people,
are quiet and humble.
They’re getting on with the work.
You might not hear them,
but they’re there.
And yes, there may always be
a level of inequality,
but we can shorten those
peaks and troughs if we want to.
That’s on me, that’s on all of you.
So when you leave this room tonight,
have a think about
where you hold privilege -
it might be in your job,
as a parent, as a teacher,
or just in the colour of your skin -
and start this work now.
Stop laughing at the jokes,
buy the book, go to the event,
diversify your social feeds,
ask the questions.
Sympathy is soothing,
but it doesn’t go far enough.
Action does.
And listen, you’ll get things wrong.
We all do, I’ve had some clangers.
But it’s not about perfection,
it’s about progress,
it’s about doing it
because it’s the right thing to do.
We are so done with waiting for society
to ‘change things’ for us.
We literally are society.
And let’s be honest,
if someone who’s lost
23 debit cards can change a law,
then I feel like you can do something too.
(Laughter)
Thank you very much,
I’ve been Gina Martin.
(Applause) (Cheers)