Her name is Gina Martin. She was twenty-five, a copywriter with no legal training and no interest in politics.
In July 2017, at a music festival in Hyde Park, London, a man took a photograph up her skirt without her consent. She grabbed his phone, saw the image, and took it straight to the police. They told her, gently, that there was nothing they could do — it wasn’t a specific criminal offence. Within days, the case was closed.
She went home and decided that answer was not good enough. With no lawyer, no funding, and no political connections, she launched a campaign to make upskirting a crime. Eighteen months later, she had changed the law for all of England and Wales.
This is how she did it.
The Afternoon at the Festival
To understand the campaign, you have to start with the moment that triggered it — and the response that turned an ordinary bad day into an eighteen-month fight.
A Photograph She Never Consented To
The event was British Summer Time, which fills Hyde Park with tens of thousands of people every July. Martin was there with her sister when she noticed two men behaving oddly nearby, then saw the image on one of their phones: a photo taken up her skirt, captured without her knowledge. She didn’t freeze. She grabbed the phone and carried it, evidence still on the screen, to the nearest police officers.
The Police Response
The officers were sympathetic, but they explained the problem: as the law then stood, the image did not clearly meet the threshold of any existing offence. There was no specific crime called “upskirting” in England and Wales. What had happened to her fell into a gap.
A Case Closed in Days
Within days she was told the case was closed. The phone was returned to the man. No charge was brought. Martin had assumed, as most people would, that photographing under a stranger’s clothing in public was obviously illegal. It was not — not specifically. That gap was about to become the fight of her life.
The Loophole in the Law
The police were, strictly speaking, correct. To see why, you have to understand how the law handled this kind of act before 2019.
The Laws That Didn’t Fit
Prosecutors trying to deal with upskirting had to reach for laws never designed for it. One was the ancient common-law offence of outraging public decency — but that generally required the act to be in public and witnessed by more than one person. Another was voyeurism under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 — but that was written around private settings like changing rooms and bathrooms, not a crowded public festival.
A Grey Zone Between Two Statutes
The result was a legal grey zone. Whether a victim saw justice depended less on what had been done to her and more on where it happened and who was watching. A deliberate act of violation could slip between two statutes and land on neither.
Fighting a Loophole, Not a Villain
This is the part of the story that gets lost in the headline version. Martin was not fighting a person. She was fighting a loophole — a far harder, far less satisfying enemy, because a loophole has no face and does not lose sleep.
The Campaign Nobody Expected to Work
She had no template for what came next. She learned how to be an activist in real time, in public, while repeating the worst afternoon of her year out loud, hundreds of times.
A Post That Went Further Than She Planned
Martin wrote about what had happened, expecting sympathy from a few friends. Instead it spread far beyond her circle. Thousands of women recognised the experience immediately — the violation, and then the second violation of being told it did not count.
Lobbying MPs With No Experience
She started a petition to make upskirting a specific criminal offence. She lobbied Members of Parliament directly, most of whom never replied. She gave interviews. She kept the story in front of people who had the power to change the law and no particular reason to bother.
The Lawyer Who Worked for Free
Then came the break every improbable campaign seems to need. A lawyer named Ryan Whelan, at the firm Gibson Dunn, read about her and offered to help — for free. He did the painstaking legal work she could not: drafting arguments, shaping wording, translating public anger into language that could survive the machinery of Parliament.
A Bill Reaches Parliament
Momentum built. Liberal Democrat MP Wera Hobhouse agreed to bring the change forward as a Private Member’s Bill. For the first time, the thing Martin had been shouting about from her laptop had a formal path through the House of Commons.
The Single Word That Nearly Killed the Law
In June 2018, the bill came before Parliament for what should have been a routine step forward. It had cross-party support and overwhelming public backing. And then one man stopped it.
One MP, One Objection
Conservative MP Sir Christopher Chope objected. Under the rules governing Private Members’ Bills, a single shouted objection was enough to halt its progress. One word. One man. The bill stalled.
The Backlash
The reaction was immediate and enormous. Chope’s name trended. Protesters left pairs of underwear outside his office. A niche legal campaign became, overnight, a national story about a broken process and how easily a lone politician could block a reform almost everyone wanted.
How the Block Backfired
In a strange way, the block was the making of the campaign. The outrage made the government’s position untenable. Rather than let the reform die on procedure, ministers adopted it as a government-backed bill, effectively guaranteeing its passage. The act meant to kill the law instead sealed its survival.
The Law That Bears Her Fingerprints
The Voyeurism (Offences) Act 2019 received Royal Assent in February 2019 and came into force that April. Upskirting became a specific criminal offence in England and Wales for the first time.
What Changed for Victims
The offence now carries up to two years in prison, and in the most serious cases offenders can be placed on the sex offenders register. Before Gina Martin walked into that police station, a victim’s path to justice ran through a maze of ill-fitting older laws. After her, the act had a name, a definition, and a consequence.
What the Story Is Really About
It would be easy to file this away as a feel-good tale of an underdog beating the system. The more useful lesson sits underneath the triumph.
Power Without Expertise
Martin’s power did not come from expertise. She had no legal degree, no seat in Parliament, no wealthy backers. What she had was a refusal to accept a bad answer and the stamina to keep asking the question long after most people would have given up. The expertise — the lawyer, the MP, the drafting — arrived because she kept going, not before.
The Real Legacy
She later wrote a book, Be the Change, framed as a toolkit for ordinary people who want to alter something and don’t know where to start. That is the real legacy. The law matters; the precedent it sets for how change happens matters more. A single person, convinced something is wrong and stubborn enough to say so publicly, can pull the institutions of an entire nation into agreement. Eighteen months after being told nothing could be done, Gina Martin had changed the law for an entire country. She never did get a lawyer of her own. She never needed one.
Sources
Voyeurism (Offences) Act 2019 — legislation.gov.uk
Martin, Gina. (2019). Be the Change: A Toolkit for the Activist in You. Sphere.
BBC News and The Guardian — contemporaneous reporting on the upskirting campaign and the June 2018 blocking of the bill (add exact article URLs).
