The protest was effective; we got large audiences watching
us for a while which was really encouraging. The worst thing about the protest
was that it was freezing, but we knew this and thought that, for the point we
were making, it was worth it.
The passion that my group put into getting it ready,
researching and doing it was really good- we all felt really strongly for the
cause and dedicated ourselves to the making and doing it. The signs allowed
people to understand what we were talking about, so making them was good- the
only thing we could have taken into consideration was that the rain would
smudge the words as time went on. The chanting got people interested in
watching our protest and the passion with which we chanted had a huge effect on
the campaign- a lot of people were shouting ‘Yeah!’ etc which was good to hear-
allowing others to become involved. The order of our protest worked well-
shouting for people to come over and then continuing with the quieter but more
personal/theatrical aspects of it. When we had a crowd we each shouted our
sentences that we had taken from ‘Project Unbreakable’. The realism and
harshness of what we were saying really shocked people and we could see this
from people’s reactions. The words we had written on our bare skin had a really
good effect because, again, it caught people’s attention even before the
protest which made them want to come and watch it. The bluntness of the words
shocked people into becoming more interested; the more risks we took, the more
it interested people.
To improve we could have thought more about the weather and
the physical implications of it; obviously we were freezing but we had thought
about this and made the decision to brave the coldness because of the message
we wanted to put across. Also, we could have thought about more physical ways
of getting our point across that would have made it more engaging, as well as
maybe thinking of more verbal things to say rather than repeating the same
lines. We did this because we had not thought about the amount of time we would
be doing the protest. Although, the repetition allowed people to really get the
point of what we were saying. The other group that did Slut Walk thought about
the theatrical side a lot more that brought a lot of people to their campaign;
we could have brought this to our protest.
Another issue with our protest was that boys shouted out
things that went against what we were saying completely. There was one shouting
‘what will you do for £20’ and one taking pictures of us because he thought it
was exciting that we were in vests... even though this really annoyed us, it
made the point more clear to them because it made them look completely stupid
when they were given a negative reaction by us and by the rest of the audience.
It made the point that they should really think about what they say normally
because it seemed as though they were encouraging what we were protesting
against. One of the boys came up to me the day after and apologised because he
knew what he had done was wrong; this made me think that our protest affected
people personally because they felt guilty about how they had previously
treated girls. Even if they don’t stop acting like that completely, it made
them feel humiliated for some time, which I thought was really interesting for
us, trying to get a point across about sexual objectification.
