In Their Shoes was an arts activism piece I created as part of the Politically Engaged Practice module in Second Year. The module focused on encouraging third year Drama and Dance students to explore how they can use art to engage with the public about a political issue as well as individually challenging us each as arts to reflect on our work and whether we consider ourselves to be activists.
In the module we were given free reign of the work we created and the topic it centred around. I was immediately drawn to the idea of raising awareness of sexual violence in the UK. This may be because, as many women are, I am acutely aware of the danger this still poses in modern society. Despite our best efforts towards equality, many women still feel unsafe even when there is no immediate threat. A study By Farrah and Farrah recorded the difference in mens and women’s fear and fond that women experienced much higher levels of anxiety and fear in situations such as walking alone at night, being home alone, using elevators or stairwells alone and so on however “The largest disparity emerged around sexual violence: While the majority of women greatly feared being sexually assaulted, less than a quarter of men said the same.”(Farah and Farah, 2019) And, this is not a baseless fear; the Crime Survey For England and Wales found that “20% of women and 4% of men have experienced some type of sexual assault since the age of 16, equivalent to 3.4 million female and 631,000 male victims” (Statistics – Sexual Violence | Rape Crisis England & Wales, 2017) From these statistics we can see that this is a widespread issue and yet, it still seems to be a taboo subject in society.
It was whilst researching the topics of rape and consent that I found a troubling statistic; in 2017, 41,186 rapes were reported to the police in the Uk. This means that a Rape was reported every 12 minutes and 45 seconds. It was from this statistic that ‘In Their Shoes’ was born. The idea was simple, we would set up in the centre of York and every 12 minutes and 45 seconds a bell would be rung and a pair of shoes laid out to represent a survivor of rape. By confronting the public with the visual of an empty pair of shoes, we hoped to confront them with the overwhelming statistic and question the silence around the subject. We also made sure to signpost to places victims and those seeking help could be professionally supported and I gained support from several York based charities and campaigns such as IDAS (the Independent Domestic Abuse Services) And the All About Respect campaign at York St John University and in doing so, gained insight from them as to how to safeguard ourselves as well as making sure we were tackling the subject in a sensitive manner.
The project itself garnered a myriad of responses, both positive and negative. The interactions which I found most impactful were those wherein people disclosed personal stories about their experiences with the topics; this willingness to open up and share that they had been touched by the project allowed me to see the ways in which arts activism can have a significant impact. It is because of this that I believe In Their Shoes was a successful project, we set about to highlight a problem that we observed and all the reactions from the public proved that we did this.
Bibliography
Farah and Farah, 2019. Sexes Sense Of Safety. [online] Farahandfarah.com. Available at: <https://farahandfarah.com/studies/sexes-sense-of-safety/> [Accessed 20 April 2020].
Rapecrisis.org.uk. 2017. Statistics – Sexual Violence | Rape Crisis England & Wales. [online] Available at: <https://rapecrisis.org.uk/get-informed/about-sexual-violence/statistics-sexual-violence/> [Accessed 20 April 2020].