I made upskirting illegal. This is why I don’t want to change any more laws

“In 2017, at British Summer Time Festival, a man stuck his hands between Gina’s legs and took a photo of her crotch.” This is how most people begin to write about me, regardless of the context. Interviews often start like this. Events I am hosting for the release of my new book will begin like this. And I get it: the campaign I led to change the law, making upskirting a specific offence in England and Wales in 2019, was a big news story. It also had a global impact; Gibraltar and France changed their laws in response and it was even featured on Saturday Night Live. I knew it had changed my life when I was nominated for an OBE.

Since I was 26 I have been known as “the upskirting girl”. I still receive emails from those who’ve used the law and get stopped on the street by people thanking me. Sometimes they pass me a note with their story hastily jotted down, because repeating it will make what’s happened to them feel too real. I cherish these interactions and I’m proud that my political activism has had a lasting positive impact, but I also have a complex relationship with it.

The upskirting campaign was my first campaign. I see it as part of my work, not the extent of it, and it’s also intimately tied to pain. For the public, being upskirted was an exciting origin story, but for me it was trauma. I was assaulted in public, and everyone knows the details. They want to hear the story from my mouth so they can enjoy the triumph at the end. The plot twist.

At some point, the narrative became no longer mine. Recently, I recounted it to my therapist, and couldn’t get through it for crying. She gently told me it may be because this was the first time someone was here to help me, not just for the story. Changing the law was the most difficult work I have done, or will ever do. I worked full-time in an office while campaigning, lobbying parliament and running a national media campaign with very little money in my pocket, zero political or legal experience and a never-ending inbox of rape threats and abuse. I came up against sexism and misogyny in parliament, was underestimated constantly, and was under the spotlight of the British media. I don’t look back at that period fondly – but my feelings about it are not only due to my trauma or how hard the process was.

In 2017, I believed the best way to prevent upskirting was by criminalising it; it was the biggest I could think and would lead to the most impactful change. The institutional script teaches us that prosecuting people for the harm they cause will solve the problem. I was also driven by the experience of being a victim of stalking who had spent years feeling terrified by a man that the state didn’t deal with, so to me, changing the law was about making victims and survivors feel safer by giving them something to use. I didn’t ask if the men who commit this act – because it is overwhelmingly men – would be changed by the process. I didn’t think of them much at all.

My politics is no longer the politics I had eight years ago. I know now that the UK has the most privatised criminal “justice” system in Europe. I know that companies who operate prisons have a vested interest in maintaining incarceration. And that prison is the opposite of growth and rehabilitation. And so here comes the tension: my immediate safety has been improved by the incarceration of men who want to hurt me, but the system that did it will not make them less likely to harm me, others or themselves when they come out.

You see, what I need in a society where the threat of danger is ongoing is not the same as the society I want. I can’t opt out of this reality, but I can see where we could be and I want to be part of helping us get there. I don’t want more prisons and punishment. I want more prevention. A small number of men convicted of upskirting have been sentenced to prison under my law (and a significant number of them were also convicted of other sexual offences; one was found to have 250,000 indecent images of children). While I am thankful that children will be safer because of his conviction, my work now also asks, “How do we prevent this before we need to criminalise it?”

Though I’m not rejecting my past work, I see my purpose now as trying to make my own law moot; if I can contribute to a reality where sexual assault is significantly reduced and the voyeurism act is used less, I’ll be happy. If I can do work that breaks the circuit of lost boys becoming insecure men who use sexual assault as a way to feel powerful, I’ll be proud.

That’s why I host sessions on misogyny and the impact of it; why I’m training in facilitation so I can run workshops with young people on masculinities and gender; and why I speak in schools across the UK as well as raise funds for grassroots organisations. There may not be a big, sparkly win, but there will be consistent impact in the form of smaller wins. There may not be headlines about the boys who attended masculinity workshops and grew up respecting people of all genders more, or about the girls who felt seen and used their voices because of activists who created spaces for them, but I’d much rather move forward as that woman than “the upskirting girl”. Even though it’s much less catchy.

• Gina Martin is a gender equality campaigner, speaker and writer whose work focuses on gender, misogyny and sexual violence. Her book, No Offence, But … is published on 27 July

• Join Gina Martin, Ben Hurst and Cathy Reay and writer Natty Kasambala, for a Guardian Live event about her new book, on Thursday 27 July 2023, 8pm–9pm. Book tickets here.

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