Ten days ago, after an hour of being an annoying creep, a man put his phone under my skirt, between my legs and took pictures of my crotch in broad daylight. He's unlucky I caught his friend looking at the pictures. Most upskirt photos are taken while the victim is blissfully unaware of what's happening.
I wish I could sit here and type that when I handed him, the picture and the phone over to the police, they did something about it. But I can't.
Before this happened on the 9th of July, I knew we had a problem. I knew victim blaming was an epidemic. I knew women were still being treated like shit on nights out by men who refuse to accept that they don't want to have sex with them. I knew that almost every single woman in my life has been sexually harassed at some stage. I knew all this. So, when it happened to me, my first instinct was to run to the people who were there to keep me safe. I ran as fast as I possibly could and fell into the arms of festival security. They took the phone, calmed me down and called the police immediately. The first safety net put in place to catch me, quite literally did.
Next, the Met Police arrived. They asked questions and took my details before calmly telling me 'there's not much we can do. If it was a graphic image, it would have been a different story.' Basically, if I hadn’t been wearing knickers, they could have done more.' My second safety net was nonexistent.
Why did I name and shame these men online? Why did I start a petition to get them prosecuted? Because no one else would help me. Because five days after it happened, the police called me and told me the case was closed, '...but don't worry! We made sure he deleted the picture'. At that point, my faith in the system was erased along with my only evidence.
The Government states that only 15% of sexual assault victims report rape or sexual assault, with some of the top reasons being that they ‘didn’t think the police could do much to help' and because conviction rates are so low, which is terrifying when you know that the 88,106 sexual offences recorded by the police in 2015 were the highest figures recorded since the introduction of the National Crime Recording Standard in 2002.
You want to know why some women don't report sexual abuse or harassment? It's because of how they're treated when they do.
After I found out my case was closed, I felt completely powerless. It blew my mind that such a huge issue in society was being treated with such a blasé approach. After doing my research, I've worked out that the only law I can prosecute them under – if they re-open my case – is 'outraging public decency', which is basically a hundred year old common law that protects the public from being outraged by seeing something indecent, instead of worrying about the violation of the victim, and if you're thinking 'what about voyeurism?' – it can't be classed as such because they 'weren't videoing/photographing me in a private space'. I don't know about that – I'd say underneath my skirt is a pretty private place.
My last option was to take the case into my own hands, so I took to social media, posted a photo of the men, explained what had happened and what the police had said, and it spread quickly. Within a couple of days it had gone viral on Twitter and Facebook, and for every supportive comment, there was an awful one. I received countless messages telling me there were worse things and that I should shut up. Some asked how long my skirt was, some told me I was a terrible person for naming and shaming them. After four days, as if the whole situation couldn't get any worse, my Facebook post was reported and taken down for ‘harassment’. The irony is painful. The only tool I had left to support me told me that these men were more protected than I was.
It's a self-fufilling prophecy; the more the system fails women like me, the more men try their luck at upskirting or groping because they don't fear the consequences. And the more common it is, the less the police prioritise it. That's why, if it happens to you, you have a duty to speak up and push for harder punishments – for all women. The only way the system will improve is if we force it to.
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Follow Gina on Twitter @beaniegigi
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.