WOW and Birkbeck Announce Initial Line-up For Shameless! Festival Of Activism Against Sexual Violence

WOW - Women of the World and Birkbeck, University of London's Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters (SHaME) project have announced the initial line-up for the inaugural Shameless! Festival of Activism Against Sexual Violence, a one-day in person event and digital programme bringing together activism and art to confront and change attitudes towards sexual violence, share ideas, and imagine a rape free world.

The festival, which is supported by The Wellcome Trust, will be a first of its kind event, bringing together national, international and grassroots organisations and charities as well as local artists, leading voices and wellness practitioners, to confront and change societal attitudes towards sexual violence. Shameless! Festival will be held at Battersea Arts Centre on Saturday 27 November and tickets are on sale now at https://bac.org.uk/ BSL interpreting and/or Captioning will be available for all events.

WOW - Women of the World's global festivals celebrate women, girls and non-binary people, taking a frank look at what prevents them from achieving their potential, raising awareness globally of the issues they face, and discussing solutions together. Inspired by the format of WOW, Shameless! Festival will be packed with challenging conversations but also moments of joy, spontaneity, laughter and optimism. The festival will welcome audiences to spark conversation, address the global crisis of sexual violence (in all its forms) and help eradicate the shame often attached to it.

Festival goers will be able to explore and choose from a variety of workshops, talks, performances and more on the day. There will be pop ups, a marketplace, support on site for whoever needs it, and the chance to connect with experts working to end sexual violence.

Founder and CEO of The WOW Foundation Jude Kelly said: "Our WOW Festivals across the world are famous for candid conversations so we've created the Shameless Festival! to open up vital discussion around sexual violence. It's a day of action, but also a day to come together and build community. I'm thrilled to be concluding the day in conversation with Emily Ratajkowski, whose new book demonstrates the power of taking back ownership of your own stories. There's great solidarity in sharing stories, and Shameless Festival! will do that in a joyful and powerful day of exploration."

Professor Joanna Bourke, Principal Investigator of Birkbeck's SHaME Project commented: "Sexual violence is a global problem that needs to be addressed by us all. The Shameless! Festival encourages new ways of thinking and acting on how we can forge worlds where sexual harms have been eliminated. We want to hear your voices."

Jeremy Farrar, Director of The Wellcome Trust: "We are delighted to be part of Shameless! Festival!. Wellcome prides itself on aiding those that have the potential to improve health challenges worldwide, which is why it is so crucial to be supporting this unique festival and its important role in addressing the global crisis of sexual violence. "

The one-day festival will include a powerful state of the nation opening session addressing the scale of sexual violence, with some of the world's foremost experts, academics and artists including WOW Founder Jude Kelly; prizewinning author, Professor Joanna Bourke; Founder of Black Minds and UK Slam champion, Rachel Nwokoro; best selling author and survivor, Winnie M Li; and Humanitarian and activist, Payzee Mahmod.

The festival will thread together some of the most urgent conversations, covering everything from the lack of inclusive service provisions, to consent, sexual violence online, medical harms and rape as a weapon of war. These talks will be led by a host of speakers including Soma Sara, the Founder of Everyone's Invited who brought school sexual harassment to the fore; and poet in residence for the Consent Collective, Tanaka Mhishi. Also included in the programme will be authors, Laura Bates and Rachel Thompson, Academic, Dr Rabiya Majeed-Ariss and award winning podcaster, Sangeeta Pillai.

Concluding the day will be an evening ticketed event with the actor, model and writer Emily Ratajkowski. In conversation with WOW's CEO and Founder Jude Kelly, this candid discussion will see Ratajkowski speak in London for one-night only about her new book My Body, exploring what it means to be a woman in a world that consumes, commodifies and violates women's bodies, and the contempt that often accompanies taking back ownership of the narrative.

The digital programme running alongside the festival will include Live, Laugh, RAGE!, an online event hosted by performance artist and academic Phoebe Patey-Ferguson alongside authors and activists to be announced. This session, produced in partnership with Battersea Arts Centre, will provide a space to rage about the tangled mess of systemic violence and how it enables and perpetuates violence against us. The digital event will explore if rage can be used as a force for imagining and enacting a different world and if righteous rage is essential to our collective survival. Tickets will go on sale in the coming months, with another online event to be announced.

Shameless! Festivals of Activism Against Sexual Violence are presented by WOW, which is run by UK charity The WOW Foundation. The festivals are presented in collabroation and as part of Birkbeck's SHaME project, a research hub for scholarship exploring the medical and psychiatric aspects of sexual violence. Placing medical professionals at the heart of the debates, the project seeks to address the global crisis and help move beyond the shame often attached to sexual violence. The project will take place over three years, with 2022's Shameless Festival! to be produced by WOW Rio curators Redes da Maré in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Find out more about the SHaME project.

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