194. Gina Martin

0:01Gina Martin:This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:11Gina Martin:Well behaved women rarely make history. Bloody difficult women do. What's astonishing about this week's guest Gina Martin is the fact that Dominique Pellico could still be abusing his wife Giselle and so could 72 other men had it not been for a law that she forced through Parliament. Welcome to Difficult Women.

1:04Gina Martin:Gina Martin describes herself as an activist. She's a gender equality campaigner, speaker and a writer. Gina's work focuses on gender, misogyny and sexual violence. Since the age of 26, upskirting was your first campaign. Your effort and your experience of upskirting and stalking, I think, led to the voyeurism bill. You know, a historic piece of statute. And you describe that as the most difficult work I've ever done or will ever do. Now, look, we will come to your gender activism. Can I take you back to summertime and a Killers concert? I think it was the Killers, Gina.

1:42Rachel Johnson:Yeah, it was the Killers. Yeah, it was British Summertime Festival. And I just returned to London after living in Greece for a couple of years. and I hadn't seen my sister in a long time and we decided to go to this festival, Day Festival. And you mentioned stalking there and I'd been dealing with stalking on and off for a period of years at that point from a guy that I went to school with and I had a police case that was ultimately unsuccessful and I was at a festival and I was having a really beautiful time and we were in the crowd of sort of 60 ,000 people and there was a group of guys around me and my sister who started to talk to us and then started to hit on us and I wasn't interested, just wanted to be with my sister.

2:33Rachel Johnson:And we started to sort of reject that kind of conversation that was coming our way from them and a bit of tension started to simmer and someone made a joke and I made, one of the guys made a joke, an inappropriate joke and I made an inappropriate joke back to him or you know I kind of swore at him um and that kind of seemed to be the end of it and then I continued watching the show waiting for the kills to come on stage and was sort of aware that people were laughing at me and I don't know if you've ever had that feeling where you've got that sort of sixth sense that people are talking about you I had that and I turned around and saw one of the guys a really tall blonde guy who was kind of to my left and in front of me um he was on his phone and he was looking at photos of someone's crotch, close-up photos of someone's crotch that were really awful photos.

3:25Rachel Johnson:And I sort of realized in the moment when I saw the photo that it was me and was in shock. And I think I slapped him on the back and I was just repeating like, oh no, I just grabbed the phone. I remember slapping on the back and then I remember grabbing the phone out of his hands because he was in front of me. so I he couldn't see me and you'll notice as I'm talking about this I'm grappling for details because obviously I've tried to not remember a long time um but yeah I grabbed the phone and then we got into a sort of scuffle and then I passed the phone to someone in the crowd there was a girl next to me I'd just talked to and she was really lovely and she said give me the phone and I gave her the phone and then I would just repeating like why why are you taking photos of my vagina why are you taking photos of my vagina he was like they're not of your vagina they're of the stage she was like claiming that I was lying about what I'd seen and then I was so stuck in the crowd that I was like I don't know how I get away from this guy so I was looking into each individual person's eyes being like help me help me because he had my shoulders by this point because we were in a bit of a I slapped him and then he grabbed my shoulders and he was like shaking me trying to get the phone out my pocket or by shaking me and I was like help me help me and then these three guys just like moved out the way and moved the crowd out the way and I just like ran through the crowd and he chased me and then I got to the security and they obviously saw you know me running crying with a guy chasing me so they surrounded me and he tried to jump over them and he was like really agitated and distressed and screaming at me and they took the phone and then they called the police and the police came and I remember there being a male and police a male and female police officer and I was I remember thinking thank god there's a female police officer because she'll completely understand and they both walked up to me and said we're going to have to take a look at the photos are you okay that i said yes they went and looked they came back and said yes that is absolutely you and they show more than you'd want it to show and it's horrible and i'm really sorry there's nothing that we can do you won't hear much from us and they said do you want to make a statement and obviously after that sentence if there's nothing that can really be done you won't hear much from us and you're crying and you're completely dysregulated and traumatized you're not gonna like i was like why would i make a statement then so I just said no um and I remember distinctly that the male police officer said it's really hard you know because if you if you chose not to wear knickers we'd be able to do something but because you chose to wear knickers there's nothing we could do it would be a graphic image if you weren't wearing knickers but you chose to wear knickers so there's not much we can do about it and I just remember distinctly thinking that can't be right because I've been told my entire life to wear more clothes so it can't be now that I've done everything that's asked of me right in this moment that me if I'd worn less garments I'd be able to prosecute like that just can't be right and I just cried and spent the rest of the show feeling very strange and then the next day I was like is this a sexual offense and I looked into it and I started there

6:21Gina Martin:it's an incredible story and I'm sorry to make you tell it again Gina I appreciate that thank you Because now it's, thanks to you, that is a crime. It's on the statute book and the wire is a Brackets Offences Act came in in 2018, came into force in April 2019. But when that happened to you, there was absolutely no recourse in law to it. Although you could tell by the police response, by the crowd response at the time, that what that guy had done was wrong. Yeah. And what fascinates me about the story, and there's a couple of things, and I actually talked to the woman who's doing flashing and choking, and she'll come onto my podcast too, Baroness Burton.

7:09Gina Martin:It's one of those offenses that I think has been often minimized because people think, when there's porn available, what's so great about a grainy photo of a girl's crotch, you know, where you can't see anything? and it's not really about the the detail it's the invasion isn't it it's the power thing it's the assault it's the kind of assault on privacy and it i think maybe we can lump up skirting along with flashing or um the other the you know things that people think are funny there's a sort of Benny Hill quality to it but they're often a gateway crime yeah and then non-con yeah exactly what when it happened to you why did it feel so bad because it was assault you know like it

8:07Rachel Johnson:you make that point that it's similar to the to like flashing let's say which is non-contact homosexual assault these things aren't about for a perpetrator they're not about an end product that's satisfying they're about violating consent and that makes them feel powerful right it's like it's about imposing something on someone that they then have to deal with that gives you a sense of power i was being punished for saying no to an advance and so the upskirting that i dealt with was a punishment a violation of my autonomy and a removal of my consent to punish me for saying no to these men when they hit on me to having the gall or the or the confidence to not want to engage with in a sexual or romantic way and i think you know that's unfortunately and unsurprisingly like not my only experience of of male violence or sexual violence and it's there it's a very unique experience because you don't i did well in my experience i didn't know it was happening when it was happening to me and i think there's something very very wrong footing and very uncomfortable and very humiliating or there was for me about the idea that they were upskirting me and everyone and people could see them doing it and I had absolutely no idea what was happening and then later it was revealed to me while I was being humiliated by a group of people who were looking at it and the material that's produced from upskirting you have no control over where it is I don't know where those photos went I don't that could still be on his phone I'm assuming it won't hopefully I scared him enough that he deleted them at some point when he sent me on the news but that lives on and we see that a with image-based abuse is that this consistent feeling of violation doesn't stop because we see image-based abuse being produced and then it continues it's put on the internet or it's shared and even if it if whether you know it is or it's not you don't know what's happened to it so there's a reminder and an echo of that violation that you just have to sit with which is incredibly

10:16Gina Martin:upsetting absolutely when when you said you thought people were laughing were they laughing at the fact that you were being upskirted they were laughing at the photo because they he'd sent

10:28Rachel Johnson:the photo on whatsapp to all his group of guy friends so when i heard them laughing was when i kind of looked and then happened to catch the image hit one of them looking at it on his phone laughing so in that moment i felt humiliated by the group but then i it was revealed to me that i had been assaulted and they were looking at the material of that sexual assault in that moment all

10:49Gina Martin:at the same time yeah is it an aggravated version of upskirting if the image is then shared of course you remember when the photographs of those murdered sisters were shared by two policemen and they are serving time for that it was sharing the images of upskirting an additional offense

11:07Rachel Johnson:yeah so it's taken into consideration in prosecution and in charge of them as an additional offense so they're hard stuff and really hard to track whether that's happened

11:16Gina Martin:what brought you to the point of saying to yourself that happened to me it ruined the killers concert it ruined my time at summertime british summertime with my sister i'm going to

11:26Rachel Johnson:change the law um it started off not with i'm going to change the law as you've kind of noticed there was there was a moment where that shifted from this has happened to me and i'm angry about it and i want to do something about it to a wider fight and that came because after i didn't get the response from the police that i'd hoped for or needed um i turned to so i was working in social media and creative advertising at the time i was a social native i used to manage social campaigns and i turned to my personal social media and i put a photograph on facebook of me and my sister at the festival that i'd found later that day that had the main guy in the group in the background of the photo and I was like oh my god I have a photo of him so I put it on my personal Facebook and said this guy and his friends upskirted me last night and does anyone know him because I have no I don't I've got no support from the police and I if I can find who this guy is maybe that'll give me so I didn't know what I was looking for that I just needed something to happen and it was shared hundreds of times and it went like baby viral like for that period of time and um then facebook contacted i got a notification from facebook saying you can't put pictures of that up because it was because it's deemed harassment to claim that someone has done something that can't be proven and then put their face on the platform so then i had the compounding of like i've been assaulted but now this guy is now the victim of the needed yeah so all of this frustration is like the safety nets that were in the system that aren't working and hadn't worked with me previously and actually had made it kind of more traumatic previously my experiences with the police um weren't working and then I turned to what felt like a kind of democratic personalized version of that which was social media which then told me that I was doing the wrong thing and then that anger culminated in me being like I actually can't do anything about my own case so I did a petition saying um like to raise awareness for upskirting like we need to take up it's going seriously the police need to take it seriously and then when i looked into law and found out it wasn't a sexual offense in england and wales but it had been in scotland for 10 years i contacted a friend of mine who was a brilliant and bright law student at the time is now a lawyer and um she ran through it all with a fine tooth comb came back to me and said yeah you're absolutely correct like it isn't and it should be and people have talked about it before but there hasn't been a kind of big push to make it one and so i i remember a specific moment where I was standing in the tube station in London on the phone to my partner and I said I think I found out that it's not a sexual fence in England and Wales and it absolutely should be and he said you should fight to make it one then and I said that's ridiculous like when would I ever I've got no political experience no legal experience like I was creative and not academic in school like there's no way I can do that and he said yeah but you're you're really creative like I think you should try I think you should try this you do marketing like you know how to get people to care about things that matter I think you should try and I went okay my case or our rights and was like obviously our rights has to win because it's not it's bigger than me isn't it and so I just went I'll take it as far as I can take it and if I fail at some point someone else can pick it up you know women throughout history have done that they've paved the way for other women to create change and maybe I would do it for a year and I would fail but then maybe someone else would see that and go okay so she's got the legislation figured out she's got key stakeholders involved and now I can take that and I've got more experience so now I can take that into parliament didn't think I would be able to take it all the way

15:23Gina Martin:so you started a petition it got hundreds of thousands of signatures 18 month battle to illegalize upskirting and then it finally became the voyeurism offences act i mean that's historic gina you must have felt incredibly proud but also i mean what a thing to do at such a young age you know in your mid-20s when your friends are like partying you know forming relationships you're you're driving legislation through the house through the house of Commons and it must have gone to both houses and met approval of course I remember the famous moment when Christopher Chope objected because it was a private members bill do you want to

16:02Rachel Johnson:talk about that moment yes to give some behind the scenes information for that I I was working with a great lawyer called Ryan Whelan of Gibson Dunning Crutcher at the time and he'd taken this on pro bono so it's just the two of us that were running this campaign and we had built up like cross-party support over like a year it'd taken us almost a year to get MPs and ministers to agree in principle to reforming the legislation in line with the Scottish legislation with some changes that were agreed by key legal experts and stakeholders we had police chiefs saying yeah this would make our job so much better we we collected so much evidence from the most important people from down the country and in Scotland to say that this should be, the sexual offence act should be changed in this way.

16:55Rachel Johnson:And there was kind of, it was really rare in that there were kind of, there wasn't a whole lot of pushback from the key stakeholders that we were talking to and our key contacts that we had relationships with across parties, Lib Dems, Labour Conservative. and we'd heard that choke was going to eject and i think it was during it was either the second or third reading i think it was the second reading but i can't remember a lot from my life at that time because i was i was not well but it was the second or third reading and ryan had told me this a week before and we've been waiting to hear from those that we're working with in the conservative party who had spoken to him what his movements would be um and i remember going to to sit there and witness it and seeing members of his party like pull him aside and have a conversation with him when it we were getting to the point where it was going to be read out and then he kind of there was no i was kind of watching his body language and i was like no i don't i don't think he's i think he's going to do what he said he's going to do and he objected and there was like cries of shame people were really frustrated because there was real support for the bill um and he blocked it and i left and was in the lobby and he was standing near me and i went over to him and said chope i'd really missed a chope i've never seen christopher which i don't think you're allowed to do but i was like i'd really like to talk to you about why you brought you blocked the voicemail offenses act and he said um which one was that oh you mean he was just sort of shouting

18:33Gina Martin:object to every bill that hadn't been debated so he didn't want to progress to the next stage

18:39Rachel Johnson:exactly and he's objected to so many private members bills that he what he almost it seemed like he just wasn't aware so it was a procedural matter not an actual objection to the content of the bill well no it was an objection to the content of the bill because my next question was do you know what upskirting is? I'd love to talk to you about the impact of upskirting on victims and survivors and why we're trying to push this through. And he said, no, I don't, and I haven't read the bill. And so in that moment, I was like, this is so wild that we can have complete support across party. And then one person like Christopher Shope who hasn't even read the bill can object to it and blocks legislation that's so important to people.

19:25Rachel Johnson:And I left the house and I wrote a statement, put that into the media before he could kind of get there. And we drummed up so much support up until that point that people were really, really angry at him. And it was a huge, you probably remember, like, I think his house was, I think people threw knickers at his house and he was escorted out of certain places with security. And, like, it was very intense. And he came out a few days later saying, well, actually, it was one of the hardest days of my life and professional life. and I remember just thinking you should try being a woman who is assaulted and is trying to push legislation through with no political legal experience.

19:59Gina Martin:And at the time it was pretty tough for you getting that through you said that it was a never-ending inbox of rape threats and abuse and you came up against sexism and misogyny in parliament so in a way what Christopher Chope did was maybe not the worst thing that you had to endure during that campaign.

20:17Rachel Johnson:No it was one of the most difficult procedural challenges of making sure we got the legislation through um but nowhere near no nowhere near the biggest emotional challenge of that campaign i'm so unwell because of all those things you've you've listed yeah why is it that when a woman tries to change the law

20:37Gina Martin:to protect other women does she receive such abuse level of abuse what's your understanding of that

20:45Rachel Johnson:um misogyny i i we our culture we have such a huge issue with misogyny in our culture and we are very very uncomfortable when people try to assert their rights that we think should probably stay in their box should probably live in a way that we deem is acceptable for their identity so i'm a woman i should be quiet and small and i should be relatively agreeable and i shouldn't be standing up loudly proclaiming that something isn't right and i shouldn't be questioning the establishment or the institutions that create the system we live in and I think there's a lot of men that are really angry at women that do that and they for me they become more evidence for why more of us must do it.

21:24Gina Martin:Dominic Pellico wouldn't have been found out had he not been arrested for upskirting. Does that show you the importance of criminalizing what people regarded previously as something trivial? And do you regard men who upskirt as potential pellicos?

21:50I regard men who upskirt as predatory, dangerous, misogynistic men.

22:01Rachel Johnson:whether committing upskirting will lead to more violent repeat offences. The only kind of data we have on that is when we did a Freedom of Information request and we found that a third of upskirting cases for, I think it was 21-22 or between 22-23, a third of them were running parallel with repeat offences of more violent sexual offences or child sexual abuse. So it is an indication, of course, of a man who wants to violate and harm women or girls, because when you think about the attitudes and behaviors that must be present for that kind of action to take place, that is one action that takes place because of them.

22:46but there could be many more and we find that perpetrators of sexual abuse and sexual violence

22:50Rachel Johnson:will tend to um push the boundaries they will practice things and then they will push the boundaries as they gain more confidence and as they need to satiate the need for those behaviors and attitudes that underlie that violence and that harm so it's no surprise that that you know we see that obscating comes alongside lots of other um horrendous violent acts and and yeah when I found that news out I read the story first and when I found out that that was how he was found really like I don't know I don't know why it still is now really emotional for me and I think it's because I don't feel any like pride about it and I think people often when they talk to me about it they expect me to be like I'm so proud that I did it and I you know such important work and if it wasn't for that it wouldn't have been caught and i and i completely understand that because that is the truth that if it wasn't for that he wouldn't be caught but i just feel so i've created something like i i just don't ever want i've created something that i never want to be used

23:54Gina Martin:we should say that the france and gibraltar changed the law in response to your campaign and the fact that you made it a criminal offense and therefore became a criminal offense in france And therefore, Dominique Pellico, who drugged and raped his wife, Giselle Pellico, along with 72 other men, wouldn't have been initially arrested had it not been for your law. And he was arrested, of course, first for upskirting. That's massive, though. It's just so massive.

24:27Rachel Johnson:It is massive. It is massive. It is massive and it's heartbreaking. But yeah, it is massive.

24:35Gina Martin:you played a part in bringing one of the worst sexual crimes in modern history to light and those men to justice it must it must be quite hard to to live and sit with that every day yeah it is it's hard to um it's heavy it's heavy all of it's heavy and it's hard to

25:01Rachel Johnson:connect to it because I spend so much time trying to so much of my work is trying to undermine my ego and just be there for people and try to make this world a better place yeah that I I don't want to get caught up in in what I've done really well I just want to keep going but you obviously have to still sit with the fact that you've had that impact and you know what was I working for otherwise well I really I mean

25:31Gina Martin:I think you did a good thing and without your work Dominique Pellico could still be doing it so you've got to accept that you know I say this to women in this podcast studio and they said to me you've got to accept the compliments when they come

26:03Gina Martin:what's very interesting about your work since is your determination to prevent not to see men go to prison because that doesn't actually solve the problem it creates more problems do you want to set out why you want to hen how you want to prevent this kind of behavior at source and attack misogyny at a far earlier stage yeah thank you for offering that i i really do want to talk

26:30Rachel Johnson:about that because i think we have lots of conversations about the worst case scenario violence that we see play out in the news and i think we really should i think that stuff is the stuff you know the stories that we read that you've mentioned there are heinous and terrifying and we have to understand why they're happening. We have to understand why this is so, why there is an epidemic of sexual violence and male violence and gender violence. We have to understand that as a culture and as a society. And I think when I came out of law reform and campaigning, I kind of sat for a moment in that forced pause we were all put into with COVID and through conversations with peers and other activists who called me in on a few things and we had some difficult conversations and i realized like i don't really know why it's happening though i know i've criminalized this thing and i think that's really important and i'm so glad i'm so grateful that i've been able to give that to victims and survivors but i want to get there much earlier like i want to be preventing the kinds and interrogating and questioning the kind of behaviors and attitudes that lead boys beautiful boys to become violent murderous harmful men and there's there's a journey there and there's there's a complex it's complex now that i've been in it for a long time i know that there is so much work to do in prevention because if we have prevention the police don't have to turn up and not have legislation to use if we have prevention um we don't have to go through the highly traumatizing like trials that we see women and survivors go through that just re-traumatize them again and again if we have prevention then young people who are going down a path like we we've heard a lot in the news you know in Australia as well as the UK about the kind of radicalization to the right wing of boys through algorithms and manosphere and influences we can prevent and course correct and I think we don't talk about that enough because it's not the big juicy story but it is where the magic happens and it is where the beauty happens is in prevention um and you can't measure it because you can't measure something that hasn't happened i know you can't measure results but you can feel

28:45Gina Martin:it can't you like when you go do your workshops with teenage boys and you ask them to talk about their female females they admire and i remember reading one of your substacks and and you gave a description of what they said and some of them were kind of jokey ones and some of them were pop stars and then one of them said my mum and one of them said my sister and you'd kind of reached something inside them that is present in the in the teenage boy but it just needs to be made more normal to to bring it out yeah it needs to we need to give them

29:24Rachel Johnson:yeah psychologically safe spaces to be to get brave enough to challenge what is the normal culture for teenage boys which is this restrictive idea of masculinity that they are socialized into and when we give them the space to challenge that they see a little window into what's possible and they see their mates do it and they validate each other for it and suddenly it becomes slightly more accepted and slightly more normal and it's really possible um but we find that a lot of the roots of violence um you know and or let's say harmful acts that teenage boys are committing in school so let's say misogyny that you might see in high school um or in the playground uh when we really drill down into that we we see boys who are deeply lost and deeply insecure and have issues going on at home or have trauma in their lives and there's a lot of really fulfilling and important work for us to do in community with stopping this stuff happening before it before it gets even worse or

30:26Rachel Johnson:helping young people to question and critically think about the way they are seeing the world and themselves and their peers and women and girls and that's really exciting work I think it's just not as juicy as a headline as I've changed the law but it's really beautiful work