Poster campaign, Change The Lineup, launched to raise awareness of sexual harassment in nightclubs

A new poster campaign has been launched with the aim of drawing awareness to sexual harassment in clubs.

Change The Lineup is the project of Tom Snell and Dylan Hartigan, and it was set up in the wake of the murder earlier this year of Sarah Everard, while she was walking home through Clapham, South London. That case led to renewed discussions around violence towards women in society, with harassment in clubs forming one part of the conversation.

Speaking to Campaign, Snell said: “We felt strongly about a need for men to change their behaviour. Nightclubs in particular proved to be a common place for sexual harassment to occur, so we devised the idea of ‘Change The Lineup’, a poster campaign designed to raise awareness of the usual ‘lineup’ that women experience on nights out, and demand a change in the way males act.”

The posters’ aesthetic takes inspiration from the colourful design of classic ’90s rave flyers, with the pair placing a number of the posters around popular nightlife hubs in London, such as Shoreditch and Farringdon, in time to coincide with the reopening of nightclubs. Listing forms of harassment women face in clubs, the posters state: “For four in five women, this night out is a reality. Let’s change the lineup.”

Speaking to The Face, Hartigan said: “People are attracted to these posters as visuals, they are pieces of art in and of themselves. People will look at them because it’s bright and wonder who’s on the lineup and it’s almost shocking. It’s a wake-up call.”

This stat is backed up by a recent YouGov poll, which polled 1,000 women and found that 71% of women had been sexually harassed in a public place. The same poll also found that 96% of respondents did not report incidents and 45% said reporting them would not change anything.

Snell and Hartigan hope to push the posters, and by extension the campaign, into clubs also, and have been discussing collaborations with venues such as fabric and Ministry Of Sound, as well as companies like Durex, and similar campaigns around women’s safety, like Good Night Out and White Ribbon. 

For more on the issue around sexual harassment in dance music, revisit a 2018 DJ Mag feature, in which five women told their personal stories, here.