GIRLS AGAINST- Teenage feminists campaigning against sexual harassment at gigs
By Orla O’Carroll
In my spare time, I attend a lot of gigs, the audiences at the gigs I attend are usually a mixture of men and women usually between the ages of 16 and 25. Luckily, I have never experienced any sort of sexual harassment myself in a crowd at gigs but sadly I have been a witness to some as well as that a few of my friends have experienced elements of sexual harassment too. So, when I was on the lead singer, Harrison Koisser, of one of my favourite bands PEACE’s twitter page, I was extremely happy to see him tweeting about an amazing campaign called ‘Girls Against’.
Girls Against is a campaign set up by a group of teenage girls who describe themselves as a group of intersectional feminists who are fighting against groping at gigs. The group decided to set up their campaign after one of them was sexually harassed at a PEACE concert. This happened at the start of October and since then their campaign has been extremely popular and supported by many other feminists as their campaign page on which they promote their campaign as well as giving people the chance to share their experiences now has over 3,000 twitter followers. They have also received a lot of support from musicians and bands such as PEACE, Swim Deep, Ratboy and Genghar as well as now being promoted on the BBC and in Dazed and confused magazine.
This campaign is extremely aspirational to me as I am a feminist and sexual harassment is something that happens daily and on such different scales and I believe that even though groping at gigs happens so often to both women and men it is easily over looked. So, by seeing five girls who are all of a similar age to me and attend all of the same gigs that I do, it inspires me to want to help to promote and expand the campaign even further.
