SlutWalk Manchester

A Reflection on SlutWalk Manchester 2011

By Greta Friedlander

The most amazing thing I did during my gap year (also the year I discovered feminism) was being a part of the team that organised Manchester SlutWalk. It was the first time I had seen a feminist cause gaining mainstream media attention. The first time I had seen thousands of people turn out for a march on a feminist issue. The day of the march was the busiest of my life, doing three television interviews, countless radio slots and simultaneously trying to work out how to safely get over a thousand people round three miles of busy traffic. The reception of the march was so overwhelmingly positive that the roads and even tram lines were peacefully cleared ahead of us, despite our decision not to let the authorities dictate our route.

The SlutWalk campaign was sparked by a comment by a policeman in Toronto. Whilst addressing a group of university students, he suggested that the girls should avoid dressing like sluts if they wished to avoid being raped. Angry at the insinuation that a survivor is to blame if they are raped, the students held the first ever SlutWalk. The key message of the movement is that sexual assault is always the fault of the person who assaults, not the person who is assaulted.

This may not seem like a controversial statement but it is at odds with a lot of the messages that we are sent by society. We warn women against getting drunk, wearing provocative clothing or going out at night. If they engage in these behaviours and get raped, well they should have been more careful. This is wrong for several reasons. Firstly, if a woman engages in these behaviours and then is assaulted, she is likely to suffer guilt and blame herself. More importantly the police will blame her too. Survivors are routinely asked what they were wearing at the time they were assaulted. The police must think that some answers to this question would change the magnitude of the crime, otherwise the question would be irrelevant. In their eyes, a woman who was wearing a short skirt and walking home alone at night must have been asking for it.

Another problem with issuing such warnings is that they do not reflect the reality of the prevalence of sexual assault in our society. They perpetuate the stereotype of a woman being pulled off the street and raped in a public place. The overwhelming majority of sexual assault takes place within the home and the most women who are assaulted will already know their attacker. Offering warnings about not going out in a short skirt does nothing to help these women. It makes women who are sexually assaulted under the most common circumstances, by their partner, in their home, doubt if their case was 'real rape'. It also takes no account of the fact that women are not the only people who experience sexual assault.

There are powerful weapons we have in the fight against sexual assault. One of the most powerful is education. We need to spread ideas about the importance of active consent. In a society that takes the absence of a 'no' as a 'yes', we run the risk that there may be a grey area in-between sex and sexual assault. We need to teach that it is never acceptable to have sex without active consent. Rape is rape even if you were drunk, even if you kissed him, even if you are a sex worker, even if he was your husband. This is the message of the SlutWalk movement, and it is a good one.

There are valid criticisms that can be made about the way this message was presented. The inclusion of the word slut means that the movement has alienated many people. It's a loaded term. It is used as an abusive label, a way to control women's sexual behaviour. It may be triggering for people who have experienced sexual assault and therefore may alienate the very people we are trying to speak up for. It is also a reflection of the way the movement started. It was started by white, middle class students. Slut does not resonate the same for everyone, across different races and classes. The women who started the movement were coming from a position of privilege. They could throw on and off the term slut in a way that less privileged people are less able to do. I was free to reclaim the word slut for myself, to go out and march in my underwear, and then to return home and slip back into respectability. This is not the case for everyone. This movement is one that is predominately white, predominately middle class, predominately heterosexual.

We planned SlutWalk Manchester despite these reservations. We felt that the empowerment of reclaiming a word that is used to control, coupled with the advantages of sticking with the brand of the movement, were important reasons to go on. The power of seeing marches of the same name going on in numerous cities all around the world should not be overlooked. We also took measures to try and ensure that even people who disagreed with reclaiming the word slut felt able to come. In all the promotional material for the march, as well as on the chant sheets that we handed out on the day, was a message of awareness about the problematic nature of the term slut. We encouraged marchers to call themselves sluts if they felt it empowered them, but not to label others as sluts without their consent.

In the case of SlutWalk Manchester we were fairly successful in making our march more inclusive than others had been. There was particularly high representation of the LGBT community. There was a huge turn-out of people in drag on the march, which I was very happy to see. It reflected the fact that trans and gender variant people have an appallingly high chance of being sexually assaulted, and countered the idea of SlutWalk being a movement only for straight women.

I am proud of the SlutWalk movement. It has raised the profile of the ongoing feminist campaign against sexual assault and victim blaming. Because SlutWalk has elements that alienate some feminists, it must always be only part of the campaign. We need a range of protests, marches and campaigns to fight sexual assault. It is a vast and ancient problem that cannot be solved in a single year by a single campaign. I hope that the success of SlutWalk Manchester was a sign of things to come.

Greta is a first year history student from Manchester. She is a part of Feminist Action Manchester which organised SlutWalk Manchester and the DIY Feminist Festival taking place in September. She is also starting a new group that will run workshops on advertising and body image in local schools. Apart from feminism she likes cats, Radio 4 and vegan food. Contact her