“And then, one night, I woke up to a loaded gun in my mouth.”

Emma says this statement with a matter of fact-ness that comes from experiencing trauma. A lot of it. There is no added drama, no inflection looking for sympathy. She is almost eerily calm. She’s a survivor of domestic abuse.

I heard Emma’s story just two weeks after Rankin called me to say he had a campaign that he thought I “would be perfect for”. It was the middle of the first lockdown, and I was well aware of the ‘Shadow Pandemic’, the spike in domestic violence as millions of women were literally locked in with their abusers. My first glimpse of this dark entity was in an article from an Italian journalist; Italy being weeks ahead in their lockdown, the proverbial yellow canary, singing a warning of what was to come.

Rankin had met with Marie Hanson, the founder of STORM, a domestic violence charity who knew first-hand that domestic violence was on the rise, to talk about what we could do to help raise awareness of this issue. Domestic violence charities received over 40,000 calls in the UK alone during the first lockdown. And then came the Guardian article that shook us to our core: domestic violence homicides had doubled in the first month of lockdown.

By the time STORM and Rankin came to me they already had an idea of what they wanted to do; Leon Butler, a writer and Sabrina Elba, trustee of the charity aspired to create a campaign made from the letters of women who were domestic violence survivors, which would be narrated by men.  

Inviting women to tell their own stories

Campaigns like this, told in a time like this, no matter how well meaning, have multiple issues; we are at our threshold as humans with the amount of darkness we can take, we have seen so much of it in 2020, and we are also, generationally speaking, designed to switch off when things become too much. We are desensitised to distressing images and stories, and so this campaign had to be handled with extreme delicacy and nuance, while still having maximum impact.

If you ask me, any good campaign is grounded in realness, authenticity, and nuance. And the best place to get that was from the women themselves. Fast forward to me being sent hours of audio of survivor stories. Sharing my living room with what felt like a new group of friends, telling me about their darkest times, their harrowing experiences, and how they found their way to freedom. I spent days on my headphones being physically moved by these survivor accounts. This part of the work was dark, intimate, and important.

The stories, while real, still needed to be given a delicate scripting, I wanted to use lines verbatim wherever possible. I added some rhythm, some repetition and reordered phrases but really for me the power was the women’s words as they said them. I wanted to keep it authentic. There were themes that stuck out to me: children knowing about the abuse, gaslighting, the shame that can attach itself to going through abuse, being in love with your abuser.

All of these touch points gave a realness to the films and an intimacy that pulls you in.

And then there was the light: the survivors finally finding freedom, finding the strength to help others, choosing their children over their abusers, and ultimately the power to leave and then tell their story.

A shared responsibility

Working with men was important from a few perspectives. It gave us the twist we needed to engage an audience that have the propensity to switch off, it gave us role models which are so desperately needed in this space, and a sense of ally-ship. Which is when we took a new turn with the campaign; the idea of creating allies and shining a light on the reality that ending domestic violence is a shared responsibility in society.

Awareness wasn’t enough for this campaign; we wanted something actionable. This is no mean feat when you have a charity of this size, run by Marie Hanson MBE, along with a handful of volunteers, facing a problem of this magnitude. We knew what we needed: safe spaces during lockdown for victims of domestic violence. An important, and lifesaving, part of our campaign was then to demand that the Government release 20,000 rooms for victims in need.

We created a petition and noise with a campaign led by our male allies, Will Poulter, Jamal Edwards, Warren Brown, Steven Macintosh and Jamie Peacock, actors, icons, influencers and entrepreneurs, who turned up open hearted, vulnerable, and ready to not only contribute their talents but back the campaign.

I wanted to keep the films simple, not much sound design, stories spoken from first person, letting the words come through, lit to feel gentle and intimate. And on set there were shivers, tears and a deep sense of connection to the women who had bravely lived the stories the men retold. When Emma’s words came out of Will Poulter’s mouth with the same tone, feeling and depth, I knew we had succeeded.

Our campaign has been a labour of love. We have had zero budget attached to it, no media spend, released on social media through a chain between the allies and the teams behind them. But one week in our mission for the campaign has been realised; we have had close to 400k views of the films and secured a meeting with MP Victoria Atkins to get our proposal for space spaces for victims, into Parliament.