This write-up consists of references to sexual offense. Lizzie * was at Bestival commemorating completion of her academic year when she was sexually attacked.
When someone got to round from behind and also pushed his hands up her skirt and inside her knickers, she was standing in a dynamic group seeing Dizzee Rascal with her ideal good friend Kate. One more man grabbed her buddy’s behind. Lizzie and also Kate left right away, not even counting on face the team behind.
“We wound up seeing Bombay Bicycle Club host a little gig on a kiosk in a field rather, as well as for a while, we transformed the narrative, stating that if that hadn’t taken place, then we wouldn’t have actually seen that fantastic collection,” Lizzie claims.
“I hadn’t thought about what occurred for a long time until I read somebody else’s account and I assumed, ‘that happened to me also.’ It felt so obligatory, a component of the growing-up experience. We normalise these points because it’s occurred to so many of us. Possibly we would certainly locate it a lot more stunning if it was really unusual.”
Lizzie, who was 18 at the time, was shocked, but soothed it really did not intensify. “We all state this too often, but it can have been a lot worse,” she recalls. “When I left, I think he possibly relocated onto the following girl– that was much more the energy. It had not been concerning me. I was the back of a head and also a relatively huge bottom, that’s all I was. I keep in mind assuming, ‘What’s he getting from that?’ He wasn’t obtaining his thrill through sexual enjoyment, he was getting it through violence.”
Stories of sexual offense have actually been hemorrhaging via right into the headlines over the past couple of years (the pandemic withstanding). One in 5 festival-goers has experienced sexual assault or harassment at a UK festival, according to a 2018