Amnesty Feminists Campaign Launch: In Partnership with Cheer Up Luv

Join Amnesty Feminists and Cheer Up Luv for the launch of Don’t be a bystander, a new campaign to end male violence against women and girls. Join Amnesty Feminists and Cheer Up Luv for the launch of Don’t be a bystander, a new campaign tackling male violence against women and girls (MVAWG). The event is organised with SOAS Amnesty Society and SOAS Intersectional Feminist Society during the annual 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence. There will be an exhibition by Cheer Up Luv, a photography project and campaign by Eliza Hatch retelling survivors experiences and tackling gender based violence. As well as exhibiting featured portraits and stories from the series, guests are invited to write reflections and contribute their experiences to the exhibition, if comfortable to do so. Guests will be invited to explore the exhibition and enjoy free refreshments before joining us for a panel discussion on what it will take to end male violence against women and girls in our universities. Amnesty Feminists will then set out what Don’t be a bystander demands and why students are our first spotlight, before chairing a panel with Eliza Hatch, investigative journalist Ellie Flynn and others. There'll be plenty of time for questions, discussion and opportunities to get involved. The government has promised to halve violence against women and girls within a decade. Halving means accepting that half of that violence carries on, and the strategy behind it leaves out students, older women, sex workers, refugee and asylum-seeking women, trans women, disabled women and others. Halving it for only some women is not halving it at all - Don’t be a bystander to male violence against women and girls! Everyone’s needed: students, academics, men and boys, friends and classmates. Let’s make change happen together! Cheer Up Luv is an award winning photo series and platform retelling accounts of sexual harassment. The project combines photography with journalism, activism, and social media, and has gained critical acclaim from all over the world. Eliza founded the campaign after being told to "cheer up" by a stranger in the street in 2017. After her male friends dismissed the experience as a “compliment", Eliza felt inspired to prove them wrong. Realising that not only was the issue completely normalised, but there was a huge lack of awareness surrounding it - Eliza began taking portraits of her friends in public places and posting the photos online. With each location reflecting the testimony of harassment, the aim was to empower survivors by turning a negative memory into something positive and reclaiming the space. 9 years on, Cheer Up Luv has expanded from a photo series into a multimedia platform, which facilitates a podcast, exhibitions, educational content, workshops, lectures and a safe space for discussions around misogyny and sexism. The photo series has been exhibited in Dusseldorf, Colombo, Warsaw, New York, Berlin, Bristol, Oxford, London and partnered with the United Nations in 2019, winning the Webby for Best Individual Editorial Feature with ‘Don’t Look Away’.