KEEP THE CHANGE
Gina Martin on shifting attitudes & activism
When Gina Martin was 16, all she cared about was, she says, “wanting to make out with Kevin — but Kevin didn’t fancy me”. Martin may have succeeded recently in making upskirting — the act of taking photos up someone’s skirt without consent — a crime in England and Wales, but, she insists, the only difference between her, a “regular workingclass person” with “very mediocre” academic grades, no political or legal experience and “no idea where to start”, and the rest of us is the knowledge shared in her first book, Be the Change: A Toolkit for the Activist in You. All of us can — and should — become activists, she says.
Martin is right — the news is full of stories about civilians making a greater difference than most politicians do in a lifetime: Greta Thunberg on the climate emergency, Malala Yousafzai on female education, Nimco Ali on female genital mutilation. Even Kim Kardashian is finally putting her influence to good use as a “criminal justice activist”, crusading against unfair prison sentences. Activism, then, is officially cool. And the publishing world is right behind them with a bandwagon of new books: for example, How to Make a Difference by Kate and Ella Robertson of One Young World, a platform for future
global leaders, and Do Something: Activism for Everyone by Kajal Odedra, the UK director of Change.org (both out in August).
Martin is her own best advert. So effective was her campaign that many of you will already know her story. After the-then 25-year-old ad-agency copywriter caught a man taking and sharing photos of her crotch at a festival in July 2017 she went to the police, but they couldn’t help as it wasn’t illegal. So she took to social media, where she slowly grew an army of supporters, and she collaborated with a young, passionate lawyer, Ryan Whelan, to attempt to change the law. After collecting more than 110,000 petition signatures, she approached the media, then leveraged that coverage to take on the justice minister. The rest is legal history.
There couldn’t be a better time to become an activist, she says when we meet: “My campaign may not have done half as well had it started in 2006.” Having cultivated a signature look of power red, Martin, now 27, is instantly recognisable.
“When I started campaigning, I was going to a lot of places [Parliament, for starters] I felt nervous to be in. Red feels like a confident colour, like, ‘I’m here.’ ” Today she’s dressed in mostly second-hand clothing — red leather “shacket”, red cropped Levi’s, black patent heels, a black beret and a 100 Women I Know rapeawareness T-shirt. This is personal branding. “My advertising experience really helped me to market the whole campaign,” she says.
Is there pressure for activists to be 100 per cent politically correct, given that taking down