Just So You Know: When Illustration Challenges Rape Culture

This paper focuses on a case study on re-contextualising illustration for second-rights use. The illustration works it discusses is from a year-long collaboration between Rape Crisis Tyneside and Northumberland (RCTN), and 2nd year illustration students from Northumbria University. The paper will first outline the students’ original illustrated merchandise work for RCTN, before discussing the re-contextualising of that work into an information pack on sexual consent. This second project was funded by a ERDF Creative Fuse grant, and it brought together an inter-disciplinary team of experts from design, illustration, social science, applied science, and law to advise the re-contextualisation of the illustrations. This paper discusses the pedagogy behind how the students’ collaborated with RCTN. It then explains the decisions that were made by the steering group that led to the successful re-contextualisation of the students’ illustrations in a second-use context. Finally, one of the illustration students will reflect upon her student experience of being involved in the RCTN collaboration from start to finish. The Creative Fuse project was completed in September 2019, and RCTN are now using the illustrated work within its outreach work across the North East of England. This includes a social media campaign via Twitter, to provoke further dialogue on sexual consent using the hashtag #JustSoYouKnow. This paper will conclude by discussing the positive impacts of using illustration to challenge rape culture, by facilitating young people to become more informed on sexual consent.