By Immy Burgess and Lowri Simmons
Featured image and gallery: Molly Goble

Manchester Metropolitan University’s 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence Festival launched this week with a powerful opening event featuring feminist activist and Everyday Sexism founder Laura Bates alongside Forward Prize-winning poet Dr Kim Moore.

Hosted by Dr Malika Booker, poet, multidisciplinary artist, and senior lecturer at Manchester Met, the event kicked off a series dedicated to raising awareness and driving change in the fight against gender-based violence.

“You’re at the start of a hectic journey of conversations, dialogue, creativity, and workshops – having the space to speak about the things that we’re not usually able to speak about,” Booker told the packed audience. She underscored the transformative potential of poetry in challenging societal norms and influencing policy, emphasising: “We’re really examining how poetry can create transformational social change in partnership with policy and policy makers.”

Booked introduced the “formidable” Laura Bates, New York Times bestselling author and activist. Bates delivered a searing address on the urgency of dismantling everyday sexism and gender-based violence. Challenging societal narratives, Bates deconstructed the phrase “lock up your daughters” – an expression that normalises male predatory behaviour while placing the onus on women and girls.

She exposed the insidious ways such casual phrases contribute to a culture that excuses harmful behaviours while policing female conduct: “Do we ever stop to think about what that actually means?”

Reading heavy-hitting excerpts from her writing, Bates debunked misconceptions about gender-based violence and conveyed her optimism for change. Reflecting on the backlash she faced when launching The Everyday Sexism Project, she said:

“When I first started the Everyday Sexism Project, there was a lot of backlash, particularly from the right-wing media. They said that I was turning women into whining snowflakes and encouraging them to see themselves as victims. They said I was weakening all women and encouraging them to look for these life experiences and reinterpret them as experiences of victimisation, essentially making more women into victims. It’s really fascinating because for me it’s the exact opposite.”

She added: “For me, the act of writing the down, the act of sharing these stories is, in itself, an act of defiance.”

Bates shared harrowing accounts from her project, including a 12-year-old girl’s story of being harassed on a bus but staying silent to “not bother anyone.” This, Bates argued, exemplifies how girls are conditioned from a young age to prioritise politeness over asserting their rights.

“By the age of 12 she had learned as a girl that it was her duty not to bother other people, not to be loud, not to be difficult or not, to make a scene, not to cause a fuss. But nobody had ever taught her that nobody had the right to touch her without consent. I think that’s work that we’re doing. If it means that more girls grow up in a world where they have that knowledge that their bodies are their own, where they know that their own body and their rights are more important than being polite and being good and doing what’s expected of them.”

Bates added: “It’s extraordinary that we live in a society that’s managed to pull off the most incredible feats of silencing the society in which all women have these long trailing lists of stories that leave so many of us still living so utterly alone.”

Following on from Bates’ discussion, Kim Moore recited some of her poetry from her book ‘All the Men I Never Married’, an anthology exploring the complexities of desire and the constant policing of female bodies in society. 

“You’re 15 [and] something in you likes that you’ve been chosen. It feels like power. They chose to touch you. [You] realised that someone would touch you without asking, without speaking, without knowing your name and without anybody seeing.”

Her poetry laid bare the cumulative weight of so-called “minor” incidents, sometimes brushed off as unimportant or “not serious enough”. She gave an insight into how it feels to be a woman existing in public, quoting a powerful line from her book: “being in public is a dangerous thing”, leaving the room silenced.

Moore highlighted the importance in not invalidating your own experiences, and allowing yourself to hold that space. “I think the coping mechanisms that I’ve used throughout my life are minimising things by saying: ‘Oh, it didn’t really matter’ or ‘It was not wasn’t a big deal’, or laughing about it, which I definitely did [when I was stalked].”

Moore echoed the power that poetry can have when used to dissect experiences and put into words the things that have happened to you. “When you write [a traumatic experience] as a poem, you can’t minimise it. The poem gives it the space and the weight and the heft that it is.”

Speaking on the power that poetry holds, Moore said: “I had a sequence in the art of falling about a lived experience of domestic violence and I naively thought that I would write a sonnet at the end of that sequence because the sonnet felt like a locked box. I’ll put that locked box at the end of it and never have to write about it again. And I really believe that that would happen. Sadly, not even a sonnet has the power to do that. So I’ve carried on writing about it.”

The event also featured Jade Jeffrey, project manager for the ADViSE service in partnership with Manchester Women’s Aid. She highlighted the critical role her organisation plays in supporting survivors and the systemic failures they often face. Jeffrey said: “For many survivors, the first place they feel believed is when they walk through our doors.”

She encouraged attendees to take action, emphasising that “safeguarding is everybody’s responsibility.” Whether through volunteering or advocacy, she called on the audience to be part of the change.

She added: “Women carry the burden of preventing them or victimisation. It’s the notion of if you’re a victim, you must have done something to evoke that or not done something to prevent it. It shifts the accountability from perpetrators on to victims.”

Jeffrey was quick to debunk these harmful narratives and emphasise how her organisation works to break down these assumptions. “For many survivors, the first place they feel believed is when they walk through our doors.”

The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence is a global campaign aimed at raising awareness and driving systemic change. Manchester Met’s festival, running until December 10, brings together poets, activists and academics to spark critical conversations.

The festival is part of a global campaign that aims to raise awareness of gender based violence and highlight the importance and urgency of this. 

The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence Festival runs from 25th November to 10th December, 2024. For more information and tickets, visit mmu.ac.uk/news-and-events.