From Making Upskirting a Crime to Prevention Work: Gina Martin on Changing Her Mind in Public

0:04Hello and welcome to The Slowdown. Activism at its best is one of the most generous things a person can do. You give your time, your nervous system and sometimes your name and safety to a cause bigger than you. But what happens when the work that once gave your life meaning begins to deplete it? When becoming a public figure means becoming a target, facing threats, scrutiny and the pressure to remain the same version of yourself forever. Today, I'm speaking with Gina Martin, a multi-award winning gender equality advocate, writer and facilitator, who at the age of 25 launched the campaign that led to the Voyeurism Offences Act in 2019, making upskirting a criminal offence in England and Wales after it happened to her at a London music festival.

0:56She carried out an 18-month campaign while working full-time and enduring hundreds of online threats. Since then, Gina has written three books and continues her work as an activist both on the ground and at scale, from working in schools on prevention of gender-based violence to writing, speaking and media work with platforms including The Telegraph, Stylist, Grazia and the World Economic Forum. Her work has been recognised by Time's 100 Next list and the Evening Standard's 1 ,000 Most Influential Londoners. But this conversation isn't only about what she's built. It's about what it takes and what it costs to do this work in public.

1:40We talk about activism, visibility, burnout, social media, and what happens when your views evolve but the public still expects you to be one-dimensional. Recorded here at Brazen Studios and sponsored by Greek swim and resort wear brand Kione, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Gina Martin. Hi Gina, welcome to The Slowdown. Thank you so much for being here. Well, thank you for having me. I love to start this show with some context. So I would love to know where you were raised, by whom, and what your earliest idea of success was. I was raised by my mum and dad, my parents. Very blessed to be raised by them.

2:25They're very funny, creative, affectionate, loving people. And I was raised just outside of Liverpool. My family are Liverpudlian and I come from a long line of scouters. And I think I had an interesting idea, or not interesting, but maybe a creative idea of success growing up because I come from a really creative family so my dad's a session musician and my mom was in interior design interior architecture and also was an artist for a while um and yeah I remember just like witnessing my parents work and like hustle and do it for a creative endeavor and thinking like to have a career like that was what success was like to do something that you really genuinely enjoyed it sounds like those are the sort of parents that would also encourage your tenacity and your ideas yeah they were i remember being really young i'm gonna say around like six or seven and we had these big beautiful trees opposite our house and the council was going to cut them down i remember just being like deeply devastated by the idea and me and my sister or like in the newspaper, like holding these trees, like no.

3:44And there's like a photo shoot. And I remember my parents being like, yes, like, or like send letters and like, you know, fight for things. And so they were just really supportive of whatever we were passionate about, which is, you know, a really healthy thing. I'm really lucky to have that. I was wondering if sort of feeling injustices was something that you felt more strongly than other kids from a younger age. I don't think I had a keen awareness of injustice as a young person. I think in terms of the actual reality of what injustice is, I grew up in an incredibly white village in a very sheltered environment.

4:21I had a sense of not fitting in, like so many people have for so many varied reasons. And I was bullied quite badly in school and physically bullied. And I felt... I just remember really struggling to feel like I wasn't weird or annoying or um I just felt constantly uncomfortable about being kind of seen in school and I I've kind of later found out that was because I'm um neurodivergent and I was really struggling to kind of like engage in school in some ways that were like normal like I used to do things that teachers would like laugh about and and then other kids would laugh about them and And then that kind of led to like bullying and there was different things that I really struggled with.

5:13But so I kind of knew what it felt like to not feel a sense of belonging, which we know is like a core psychological need. Not feeling like that was really hard. And it went on for years and years and it was physical and I felt very excluded at times. And so I think there was maybe that sense that was very clear to me as a young person and probably followed me and definitely has followed me into my and did follow me into my young adulthood. and I remember really reaching out to and wanting to be there for other kids who were experiencing that in different ways like feeling really strongly that I knew what that felt like.

5:47How did you find living in London as opposed to where you grew up? Oh my gosh well I went from a tiny village to Leeds for uni and I loved Leeds like Leeds is still one of my favorite cities and then once I graduated I just remember getting the mega bus constantly for like five pounds it took hours and hours from Leeds to London with my friend who was also wanted to be in the industry and advertising and we would just find places to stay and eventually this guy um who owned a pub in North London offered that we could stay in the storeroom of his pub and he had this like it was he's he's like he's like now like my one of my dads like he's the best but I remember at the time being like we're gonna get killed like this is weird and me he offered us this room in the storm of his pub you know he had like a big marketing four foot tall red bull ten in there and like it was a single bed and me and Jen were like we'll take it and we we ended up staying for two weeks while we were interning and then he just offered for us to stay as long as we want and he's still today this is you know 13 years later 14 years later he's such a wonderful but at the time I was like what like what are you doing like why did you do that are you okay um and I remember finding London really

7:08like exciting but also like fitting because I grew up in a village but it was my dad's job I was really lucky to travel because he'd be playing in Paris or whatever and um we'd sometimes be flown out because we were his family. And so we were like a working class family, but we had access to these experiences that weren't working class at all. And so I had access to different cities and my family, you know, originally from Liverpool and stuff. So I always felt a pull to a city. And once I got to London, I was like, okay, there's so much opportunity here. There's so much opportunity to create a creative life.

7:41I want to obviously go into what then happened in your early 20s but I'm also conscious that it defined such a big part of your 20s and so I guess before I ask about it I was just wondering how looking back that makes you feel in terms of how you got to experience like London in your 20s that's a really thoughtful question I have before that particular assault that we're alluding to, which is me being upskirted at 25, 26, I was just turning 26. I have the before that in my mind, which is this kind of experience of being really excited about being in the industry, trying to get a job in advertising, having all of those firsts that you get in a city where you feel like you're really part of something and you're exploring and you're meeting people you'd never have be exposed to at home and you're loving every second of it and and there's probably a lot of silly things in that and a lot of kind of risk involved in that and a lot of learning and then I have I actually went to live in Greece for a year and a half halfway through that and then when I came back from Greece literally two months later the um the upscoting happened and then I have a very very patchy memory of the two years after that like there's there's not much I could tell you apart from the campaigning I can't really remember my life outside of campaigning during that period but it was a significantly traumatic period um and so there's a kind of before time and an after time I know it's hard to like go back there and you've probably spent a lot of time trying to forget a lot of it but at the same time having to go through the courts you had to probably recall so many details of it as well um but if you will I wanted to just go back to Hyde Park British Summertime Festival 2017 the killers are playing um you've got your sister beside you I guess I'm curious about like what you were feeling in that moment and obviously like what actually happened to you um I remember that entire experience minute for minute second for second I remember that very very uh clearly um And I'm going to try and tell you about it not in the way that I usually talk about it, because I know that there's like room for nuance here in this discussion.

10:02And usually I kind of say the same thing every time because I've probably told the story like 2000 times at this point. So I'm going to try and actually be present while I tell it. I remember being really excited to be with my sister again because I've been abroad. And it was like the reunion moment. It was like this band that we loved as teenagers when we were much younger. and we were able to come together and actually see them for the first time. So I was really, I was just in joy. Like I was so excited to be there with her. And as we were waiting for the killers to come on stage, it just got very apparent that there was a group of guys near us that were like trying to engage in some way.

10:43And I'm incredibly extroverted. So I'll talk to anyone. Like in my job, I have created a career for myself where I spend most of my time with strangers because I love interacting with people. But as soon as I get this sense that particularly men are trying to encroach on or engage with something that I'm doing in a way that is entitled or in a way that is inappropriate, I can smell that a mile off and I shut that shit down very quickly. And that started to happen. The guy started making comments. He made a sexual comment and I immediately kind of mocked him. and then me and Stevie kind of turned away from them created some space and kind of tried to watch the show and ignore them and just from that one interaction where he'd made that sexual comment and I'd kind of mocked him back or like said something quite cutting to him I felt one of the guys up against my back and then there was two of them standing in front of me and kind of turned around because I felt someone up against my back and he was just standing there it's like nothing weird and then the two guys in front of him of me started laughing and I could just tell that they were laughing at me I could tell that something had happened so I kind of looked around to the front of one of the guys and he was on his phone and he had a photo of my crotch and my knickers and like a really close-up photo of under my clothes on his phone I'd had like a couple of drinks so I was quite impulsive and I grabbed the phone and I started screaming I was like why are you taking pictures of my vagina and he was like I'm not I'm not um and then a girl next to me who I'd just been talking to me and Stevie had been talking to her who was really lovely she'd been like pass me the phone so I slipped her the phone and the guy like got hold of my shoulders and was like shaking me he was this huge guy and he was like shaking me and I like slapped him really hard and then looked at these two guys to my left who were really young They must have been like 19 or something, but we were in a crowd of 60 ,000 people.

12:41So I couldn't like move or get out. And I looked at them and I was like, help me, help me. And because he was like holding into my shoulders. And these two guys just like moved three people out of the way and just went, run. And so, and the girl passed me the phone and I ran to the police because I'd seen where the exits were. I ran to the police and he chased me, the guy that had had a hold of me. And I got to the police and they kind of surrounded me and he was jumping over the police. He was absolutely infuriated. And I said, he's been taking pictures of me. and I gave him the phone. And then two police officers came, a female police officer and a male police officer.

13:12And I was really relieved that it was a female police officer at the time. I thought that a female police officer meant a particular type of response. And they both said, okay, we've seen the picture. It shows more than you'd want it to show, but there's not much we can do because you're wearing knickers. And I was like crying and super confused because all I'd ever been told was wear more clothes in order to control men's behavior and he said well it's not a graphic image and so because it's not a graphic image I don't know if there's much we can do do you want to make a statement and obviously I said no because he just said there wasn't much they could do and they went okay really sorry we'll be in touch and then they kind of left and I was just like left at this festival with the guys that were there and had no idea what just happened and i went home and contacted a student lawyer friend of mine and said do i have like any like remit here to like prosecute because this feels wild and we found out that upskirting wasn't a sexual offense in england and wales but it had been in scotland for a decade and that's kind of where the beginning of campaigning started for me this wasn't my first experience of sexual violence or of assault it was the experience that broke the camel's back where I was so frustrated with the response I'd put a picture on social media of the guys I'd happened to get when I'd taken a selfie with my sister that day the next day I put that on Facebook and there was it went kind of a tiny bit viral for the time like 8 000 likes or something and um Facebook took it down and cited harassment on my part for putting the picture up so I just every single safety net was not doing its job and I just got infuriated and that's where it started Yeah.

14:55You have a very good way of explaining like why you think people do these things, because it's not the most like salacious of images. It's not like going to make him money on Pornhub, but it's like why in that moment where they clearly felt that they had lost some kind of upper hand with you. It's about control and power. The idea that specifically obscurting or any type of image based abuse is about sexual gratification isn't necessarily true. When we changed the law, we made sure to include distress or alarm or humiliation because this is a tactic that patriarchal and misogynistic men use when they feel like they've lost a sense of dominance or a sense of power over the woman in front of them.

15:41We see this with men who hit on women and the woman says no and the immediate response is like, yeah, well, you're not that high anyway. There's a punishment that comes when women reject men because their social script says that they should have dominance and that they should be able to engage with women in a way that is objectifying that makes them feel more masculine and when we say no to that there are a lot of men that get incredibly uncomfortable and when you're uncomfortable and you have big feelings revenge becomes something that is an option and that's kind of what happened to me when you when you transgress someone's autonomy and someone's rights You feel like you gain something.

16:21You feel powerful. And that's what he felt in that moment. There could never have been consent because I was standing in a festival watching a show. There was not one moment or part of me that was interested or had even considered showing a man I don't know my crotch or my genitals. And in these moments where you're extremely violated, a lot of people would kind of go into themselves be embarrassed by the whole thing but you chose to make a petition spend 18 months campaigning this and getting this passed into a law like why I suppose did you or where did you find that in you was that the girl that hugged the tree again or was that some sort of new lease of energy that you felt like I need to do this there's a Venn diagram that would probably be able to articulate why I decided to go that hard on it and publicly and why I was relatively comfortable to do that I would say the parts of the Venn diagram would be yes being raised in a family where my voice and the things I cared about and my autonomy were consistently developed through my parents there's a part of that Venn diagram which is that there were many times previous to that where I had absorbed men's behavior and felt uncomfortable with it and and thought I I couldn't do anything about it this wasn't this I think it's sometimes easy for us to frame people who do these kinds of things that have a certain amount of courage to their actions as that's just who they are it's not like I was also terrified the whole time like but I'd had there had been enough moments where I'd absorbed men's behavior I'd had so many small and large experiences that I'd lay in bed thinking about and that had made me feel unsafe and scared and it just so happened that in this environment at this time I was so angry and so incensed by what happened like on the day I was with my sister I was in a crowd of people I actually think partly the environment allowed me to say something because I was with her and my sister is my backbone and also all of these people were around us and so once I had the phone I knew I could prove to people that this had happened because so much of female sexual harassment is like are you believed yes it's your your it's the truth versus the perpetrator's um story and in this case it wasn't there was lots of people around us who saw it happen or saw the evidence of it on the phone and then having particularly people around me like my partner my partner was instrumental in me deciding to try and change the law.

19:21He was the one that was like, I was like, okay, it's my case, which I don't really have a case because it's not a sexual offense, but I can maybe try and prosecute under this hundred year old common law that doesn't even recognize as a victim. Or I could try and change something to do with the legislation. And I thought that was like the wildest idea. And it was so unrealistic. And he was really like, no, you should do that. Like, why can't you do that? You should definitely do that. And so was my sister. And so was my family. And so my friends. And I really think the people that I have around me really emboldened me to to do it when I thought maybe that was a stupid idea yeah and in those 18 months of campaigning and then successfully having that law passed what was like the hardest part I don't think there was a part of that process that wasn't challenged I would really struggle to pinpoint a particular part of that that was the most challenging because I honestly like emotionally you know not if god I actually can't even I can't even like really um pull it apart the the process of consistently campaigning every because I did it every single day um and I was working a full-time job for like 24 grand a year and so just the the um schedule of that was exhausting the emotional weight of feeling the responsibility to pass it because I was constantly getting stories from you know everyone from an 11 year old girl who was at school who was upskirted by a student in her class to a 90 year old woman that it happened to from female teachers whose male students had done it to her like the the collective amount of stories thousands of them I felt like a real responsibility to to finish it um which was really challenging um because that can create like inertia you can be like I can't I'm too because I was absolutely terrified that I wouldn't be able to do it um and then alongside just learning about British politics and being in parliament and being at Portcullis house all the time and having all these meetings and having to play a very strategic game with my lawyer that It was genuinely like we were playing politics with the politicians because we had to, because you can't just ask politicians to do something.

21:41That's not how it works. A lot of British politics is around optics and it's incredibly, it's actually incredibly depressing. So like learning all that on the job and then I was dealing with like rape and death threats the entire time. I was also learning so much about myself politically and like I was having like kind of a political awakening at the time and I was finding it really hard to let people in in my life because what I was experiencing was so unique and I felt so alone in it so there was quite a separation between like me and my people apart from my partner and my immediate family I kind of was not really available for a lot of it and I didn't have a whole lot of support because I didn't let people in on it it was it was really um as I say I don't have memories of those two years really and that's because it was incredibly there was lots of trauma that came along with it but it was um yeah it was it was a baptism of fire for sure and I learned a lot about myself and when the voyeurism act was passed in 2019 did you feel a sense of catharsis or a sense of like I've done it for all these other people or was there now a sense of like what do I do now what was the feeling like when it was passed and just after I sat in the gallery and watched them pass it with my family and friends and I had an idea of what I thought that moment would be like a hypothetical idea and I felt literally nothing like I sat in the gallery and I remember them passing it and my family being like yay and I literally was like okay I don't know why I think that's probably a protective mechanism of some kind and then I left and we went to the pub and we sat and drank for ages drank well um we sat and drank for ages in the pub uh me my lawyer my family and just talked about it all and after a couple of drinks like a very intense sensation of like like absolute relief but not like joyous relief like exhausted

23:55relief i was just crying couldn't stop crying and i was like i'm so glad it's over i'm so glad it's over like i was just so desperate for it to be over by that point i've never really felt i've never really felt like an embodied sense of pride about it like because ultimately i didn't really want to do it i think that's what it comes down to is that like you're proud of things that really fulfill you but I never wanted to fight the government on changing the law I just felt like I had to because I was so angry and so broken by my experiences so I think when it finished I was just like relieved and like thank god that's over you know but then you obviously stayed in activism and was there a process of you figuring out like clearly I'm good at this and I want to help people but I need to actually work take a step back almost from this experience and figure out what how am I best used to actually help and what do I care about?

24:52It was about a year afterwards where I was being offered all these like wild opportunities and I wrote a book and there was all this commercial, there was like awards and like I was just like invited to like TV shows and like oh you know huge events and like it was like the flavor of the month type person at the time and I remember going to loads of those things and be like this is really fun and then after a little while being like this isn't like why I do any of the work I do like I don't know what I'm doing here like I can't replicate what I've just done again I'm not going to be changing laws my whole life that's not a job that's something I felt I had to do at the time um and so I remember pausing and thinking about the people who I'd spoken to who I'd respected and and how they'd kind of reflected on what I'd done and what I could do and there was lots of at the time there was lots of recommendation to stand as an mp interestingly um and go into politics in some way felt much more connected to the idea of being in community and doing grassroots work because that's kind of i only started that that campaign for people i didn't i didn't do it to gain access to the halls of power that wasn't why i was doing it um so kind of took a little bit of a pause and worked um for naomi nicholas williams pro bono for a little while on a campaign she was running to change global instagram policy because it was discriminating against um plus-sized black women's bodies it was censoring them and we won that which was great we changed that global instagram policy so i remember doing a couple of things and thinking like yeah this is what i want to do um but i didn't know what that looked like and i didn't know how you made money from it ultimately I think I it took me a long time to figure out how to actually have a career that is about impacting and making change in terms of gender violence I'm glad I'm here now but it took a little while I saw a post that you did that I think epitomizes some of your complex feelings about what you achieved seven years ago and kind of the journey that you've been on since and the ways that maybe you've not necessarily changed your mind but this these emotions of I did this thing seven years ago as a as a survival as a reaction to something that happened to me but does that necessarily mean that I now have to be put in the box of somebody who is basically pro-punishment right yeah that that's that that's kind of what you then get known for in activism it's worth really remembering that you were like 25 when this all happen to you and most people don't know much about systems change and how education works and so at what point did you actually start to kind of widen your aperture and think about systems change and education and then once you did figure that out and you started to do the facilitation work that you do in schools with young people because that's really where it starts like if we were to go back to that incident with you what would have happened if those boys had had a better education you know didn't have those like locker room conversations that we talk about and when you started to do all of that how did you then feel about this law that you had passed that is effectively a punitive law that punishes people um in our very you know not great criminal justice system right but i'm interested in that personal journey that you took of like learning more what it is that you learn and then how you felt the difficulty you felt to then reflect that to this audience of hundreds of thousands of people that follow you that expect you to be kind of one voice on one thing when you're actually a human that is multifaceted and evolving and changing um I started to have complex feelings and a complex relationship to my work not long after I finished it.

28:51So I would say around 2020, a couple of like comrades and peers who work in kind of different areas of justice work invited me to a conversation where they asked questions about my relationship to the police and to the government. And, you know, got to remember at the time I had had to work with all political parties in Britain, but it was a conservative government under Theresa May that I was working with primarily to force them to change the law. And I say working with because although you have a tense relationship, you become a thorn in their side. So from the inside, they're not liking me.

29:33We don't have a good relationship. But the relationship has to be productive enough that we can work together to change the law. But from the outside, I also think it looked much more unified than it was. and I think that I absolutely hated working with them. And I've actually only two days ago just had the first interaction with the police, two days ago with a police case I currently have, that was actually compassionate and thoughtful and positive, first time in 14 years of different things with the police. So I really struggled with the institutions that I was working with and a couple of peers of mine pulled me aside and said, okay, I know that you feel like that, but you wouldn't know from the outside.

30:24Like you wouldn't, watching you, you wouldn't know that. And your work is carceral and carceral feminism is a type of feminism that says that by increasing powers of the police and putting people in jail, we solve the problem of violence. And that's just categorically not true. We don't solve violence by putting people into inherently violent systems. The men that go into our privatized prison system in the UK, which is the most privatized in Europe, are not more likely to come out less violent, less harmful, and less likely to harm themselves or other people. So this isn't prevention work. And we had conversations about that.

31:07And those conversations forced me to look at my work and say, where do I really stand on criminalization and carceral feminism versus like justice and prevention um and how do I feel about it and it was really uncomfortable I spent like seven seven or eight months this was like during COVID there was like that forced pause and like a lot of that forced pause for me was me kind of like wrestling with that question um doing a lot of reading doing a lot of journaling going to therapy a lot and wrestling with the idea that I'd done that and maybe I was a bit of a poster and I think I was I was like a poster child for carceral feminism at the time but but my politics were moving way past that and I also had to engage with the idea that it's really nuanced right like the law that I changed that makes upskirting a sexual offense is not mine it's also something that victims and survivors across the country and across other countries are incredibly thankful for and that's not an experience that I get to dictate it just isn't I also benefit from laws like that there's a man in prison that stalked me for seven years and the moment he was put in prison that I didn't turn on my home alarm system.

32:27I have felt more safe since he was in prison than I ever did before. However, he will come out of prison at some point. And I don't know that he's less likely to contact me or harm me or harm himself. And so I've benefited from those laws. But my politics and my feminism is rooted more in abolitionist tendencies now and is rooted more in this idea of prevention because I don't know how we get out the mess we're in without prevention work. If we're not disrupting harmful patriarchal white supremacist cycles early and we're not doing the work that helps people to come back to themselves before these systems tell them who they're meant to be, the police arrive after the fact.

33:09Criminalization happens after the harms occurred. We have to be earlier in that process. So I learned a lot from people who are now my North Stars, like Angela Davis and Audre Lorde and Bell Hooks and Richie Reseda and different abolitionists and community leaders across the world whose work I follow. And I had really difficult conversations with myself and I decided to be public about the fact that my politics have moved on and that I don't want to be known as someone only who criminalized something because to me prevention is a much more exciting and realistic and human endeavor than criminalization is.

33:50And that much more fits the kind of person I want to be and the kind of advocate and feminist I want to be. And give me an example of what prevention work looks like. You go to a school, what kind of age are the students? What kind of conversations are you having? So prevention of gendered violence specifically, which is what I work in. if you take the drivers of gendered violence one of which is rigid gender stereotypes so the gender binary and this idea that people have to live and look and be and appear and move and love in a certain way dependent on the construct of gender so being a man or a woman and doesn't recognize anyone outside of that being able to allow people the space to question those rigid gender expectations and explore what it would mean for them to identify where those expectations aren't so good for them, are restricting them or harming them, and how those expectations shape their behavior and attitude towards other people is prevention work.

34:52Because what that looks like in real terms is going into a school and being in a room with year nines or year tens or year 11s like I have been doing for the past three years and having really honest conversations with young teenage boys about what are the expectations placed on you to be considered a man or a boy what are they and they'll say all the things that you expect them to say they'll say things like fix things on your own be strong um show emotions like angry banter or happy but don't show any other emotions or any vulnerability they explain essentially the man box this kind of restrictive idea of masculinity that they're in.

35:30And then we have a conversation about the ways in which they police each other into that. And what is the outcome if you believe you have to be only these specific things in order to be a valuable man or a valuable boy? And we connect, we create a space for them through activities and through conversation and through curiosity where they can connect the dots and recognize the actual real world impacts of that, both in society and with an individual like if everyone's buying into this then what happens so they start to connect how these this really rigid idea of masculinity is actually causing them harm but it's also causing people of agendas harm as well and so that's prevention work because it shifts the paradigm of how boys and men think about their identity and it allows them to be more expansive about their identity but more importantly it creates a social experience where they're supported for doing that by other boys that they know.

36:24So then there's all kinds of different, you know, sectors and practices and prevention work. But ultimately, what it is, is on the ground work that people undertake in any setting in a workplace, in a community, in an education setting, where we are educating, disrupting and giving people space to push against the drivers of gendered violence. Yeah. You know, I don't just take sponsors for the sake of it. So when I tell you that I believe in Keone's commitment to sustainability, I really mean it. Every fabric they use is OECO TEX certified, which is a certification that sets the benchmark for textile safety.

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37:43This is what I want to see more of. Not just beautiful things, but beautiful things made responsibly. So I'm honoured to have Keone as the partner for this whole season. And there is also a very special discount exclusively for you, my dear listener. Just put the slowdown, one word, at checkout for 20 % off your first order at keone.com. see this is really important work beautiful work that is close contact intimate you're in the room with people you're educating you're sharing and I suppose what I find fascinating in our system is that that's not glamorous work like that's not going to get you a million followers on Instagram but doing the work that you did where it's like this big kind of glossy um you know we're gonna pass this law going to awards as you said and being this like talked about person and being in the media and being asked to do all these things and being in the um you know time 100 next list and so on does that frustrate you it frustrates me no end that that this big shiny version of the work is recognized um and that the intimate important human grassroots work is not recognized there's a re there's many reasons why that's the case um one is that like capitalism will capitalize.

39:20It's a neat story. It's an individual human story, the law change. It's the girl who was assaulted and then she fought the system. David and Goliath. Yeah, it's exactly that. And you can put me in a pink suit with my fist in the air and say, smash the patriarchy and put me in a magazine. You can't capture or measure what happens in a room when we have to have, when we're having like difficult, messy, clunky discussions with teenage boys over three and a half hours in a classroom of a school with not much funding. There's no beautiful outfit. There's no, there's also, you can't actually watch it because we have to protect the kids and we have to actually create intimacy and safety for people to do that where they're not seen or they're not perceived.

40:03And we know that, you know, there's going to be no punishment for their honesty or the things that they say, which are a lot of the time, you know really difficult to hear because they're not they don't say the right thing they don't articulate themselves well they say the bullshit stuff that you don't want to hear or they frustrate you that's part of the work and so the human grassroots work will never be the big shiny thing because it's directly in opposition to the status quo and it's not sellable and it's not commercial and it frustrates the hell out of me but I really don't want it to be because it's there's it's incredibly and I don't use this word tritely like it's it's sacred stuff like it's important human stuff and you can't capture that in a Instagram post or in a you know op-ed or in a whatever like you just can't um it makes me infuriated that people who do this work on the ground are struggling to pay their rent but if you do you know a big shiny campaign like I did which you know I'm not disparaging it but I think the commercial opportunities that came off the back of it was like a real moment where I went oh hang on okay right okay this is like a moment there's like a real commodification of this this thing and I don't feel comfortable with that necessarily and it's not why I got into it and I did step back from social media um like when I started facilitating that was because the unsafety that came from the public platform I had like it was just like getting worse and worse like the threats and the police cases have just they just got worse and worse up until 2023 and then there was something that happened in 2023 that was really messed up and I was diagnosed with PTSD and I couldn't leave the house like I couldn't function because I was so scared um of what one of these men would do um and so I thought like hang on this isn't like worth it I can't live like this I just if it means I can't have social media and I don't have as many followers and I don't get any commercial jobs like I don't care and I kind of removed myself from that world a little bit which was the best thing I ever did because I got to go into rooms every day with young people and work with people who actually do this shit every day and and live for it and they don't get awards and they don't get to feel a magazine book that they shouldn't because that's not what it's about it wasn't really about that for me but it became about that for me for like a year for some reason so i'm much happier in this work i'm much poorer it frustrates me so much the funding the lack of funding i can't express to you it's so the the work that people do every that they have the way that they have to regulate themselves the way that they have to show up the the the emotional risks they have to take the the things they have to deal with in prevention work it's like and most a lot of people are coming from prevention work because they've had experiences of gendered family violence and sexual violence.

42:55They are survivors, a lot of people that work in this work. It makes me really angry that it's not funded better and that they're not taken care of more. How do you find the balance now between posting on social, being on these platforms, using... There are also many positives to having a voice and being able to share and speaking to people with the community work that you do. and how are you able to on this platform provide like some more nuance I feel like I'm kind of coming I'm gonna kind of come back online and I'm doing that in a way that is for the the work that I do rather than for me because I think for a little while after the law change it felt like a bit of like a cult of personality type energy and it was kind of becoming it all came and came about me and like obviously the whole point of the change was like for other people um so i kind of wanted to decenter myself a little bit which is why i changed the work and obviously i should my politics changed and i went into prevention and i it was about being one in a room rather than everything being about me which is very uncomfortable so now i'm kind of interested in how can i create content long-form content and um more like remote facilitation actually Like how can I do my job with experts that I know and organizations I know online and people can access that work, that prevention work.

44:23And then I can just use my socials to as a shop window so people can find that work. rather than um posting to keep my reputation up or posting to keep myself you know in the scene i'm hoping to bring a bit more like political and practitioner rigor to my online platforms and see how that goes um just lessen the distance between offline and online me one of the things that we talk about on this podcast is is burnout and i think obviously you've been through so much with the incident that happened three years ago. Is there any particular time that you felt the most burnt out from work? And what did that actually look like?

45:11I actually went to my doctor here, who I love, shout out Dr. Balvinda. He's so great. He's like, he's the most calming. I live in Australia and you have to pay for healthcare here. It's a privatized system, which is not great. But because of that system and because I was able to pay for my appointment, you get a lot longer. And I sat with him. I kind of went to the doctors and was like, I'm losing my mind. And this was before I knew I had PTSD, but something had really changed. I was just struggling to function. I was very unwell mentally at the time. And he asked me about my sleep and my routine and the symptoms.

45:52And we sat there for like 30 minutes. and he said to me at the end I'm really concerned that you're approaching burnout I mean clinic he was like people throw that word around a lot but I mean clinically I'm concerned about because I was having night terrors and I couldn't sleep and I was forgetting to eat and I wasn't showering for days and I couldn't regulate my emotions at all and I don't mean like be super calm and chill I mean like I was panicked my arms would be shaking I would be sweating like dripping with sweat one minute I would be crying uncontrollably I would forget everything I was it was really like couldn't function um and he said those words and I remember being like I don't know what that is but I've heard it thrown around a lot but I I'm unable to I'm the closest I've ever been to being unable to function and of course in my um work I was working part-time at an organization in the schools at the time and I was just finding that I'd be like crying on the way to the workshops and I could I was like I don't know how I'm gonna get in front of this room and do it and every time I would because I'm so passionate about it and I loved working with the kids so much but it took a diagnosis of PTSD and I also knew that I was neurodivergent and I'd learn a lot about my brain and what I need, like what my brain needs.

47:15And as my therapist asked me to make a timeline and a session once, and she said, go back to 2012 and can you write, can you draw lines of when you've been experiencing either an experience that made you feel significantly unsafe, a police case, or a traumatic event. And so I like drew out these lines. And because I'd had this stalking case for seven years, And then there'd been a few traumatic things in my life. And then I'd had the assaults and then I'd had didn't be doing the campaign. And then I'd had all the rape and death threats. And then I'd had a bit of a small gap. And then I'd had they'd increased to the point of having multiple police cases.