IT’S tough to bring a roomful of activists to complete silence, but one speaker at the annual Radfem Collective conference managed it, with a powerful story of rage and grief transformed into action and social change.

Gemma Aitchison told the 70 delegates the story behind her setting up the Yes Matters group, campaigning for compulsory sex education. Her sister Sasha Marsden, then aged 16, was brutally murdered in 2013. Her stabbing was sexually motivated, and her sister set up the community group that year, getting consent onto the sex education curriculum. The community group teaches young people about gender stereotypes and “how damaging and limiting they are.

“Sexual objectification culture is in the air that we breathe, practically. The idea that objectification is ‘empowering’ doesn’t make sense. An object serves the need of the subject. There’s no need for a chair to consent before you sit on it,” she told the conference.