VAWGRN Webinar - What Impact will the Police Crime Sentencing & Courts Bill have on Survivors?

Chair: molly ackhurst

Speakers: Sita Balani (KCL); Janey Starling (LevelUp), Black Venus (Sex & Rage), and Estelle du Boulay (Rights of Women)

molly ackhurst

molly has a practice-based background having worked in sexual violence support for many years. This combines with her extensive experience as an activist, writer, and facilitator with a number of different social justice groups. All her work is rooted around creative approaches to trauma and uses emergent arts based methods to foster direct action and everyday intervention. This approach feeds into molly’s academic work and she is currently undertaking a PhD in the Birkbeck Criminology department where she looks at justice and sexual violence. More specifically, her work explores the blockages that exist around imagining more transformative ways of supporting survivors obtain justice outside the criminal “justice” system in the UK.

Sita Balani

Sita Balani is a Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Culture at King's College London. She is co-author of Empire's Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in Five Dials, Vice, Feminist Review, Novara Media, Open Democracy, Tribune, The White Review, and on the Verso blog.

Janey Starling

Janey Starling is a feminist activist and co-director of campaign group Level Up, a growing community of UK feminists whose mission is to interrupt all forms of gender injustice. She spearheaded the campaign to change media reporting on domestic violence, which culminated in the researching into families bereaved by domestic homicides’ experiences of the press and the writing of the UK’s first press guidelines on how to report fatal domestic abuse.

Venus

Venus is a sex worker, facilitator and performer. She is founder of Sex and Rage, a sex worker led organisation that resists stigma and shame through sex education.

Estelle du Boulay

Estelle is director of the women’s legal rights charity Rights of Women (RoW). RoW provides free legal advice to women across England and Wales who are experiencing or at risk of Violence Against Women and Girls. RoW has been critical of the PCSC Bill and has worked with others to lobby against it. Prior to this she was the Director of the anti-racist charity Newham Monitoring Project for 10 years. She is a co-founder of the campaigning group Netpol.