A die-in, sometimes known as a lie-in, is a form of protest in which participants simulate being dead. Die-ins are actions that have been used by a variety of protest groups on topics such as animal rights, anti-war, against traffic violence, human rights, AIDS, gun control, and environmental issues. Often, protestors occupy an area for a short time instead of being forced to leave by the police. In the simplest form of a die-in, protesters simply lie downon the ground and pretend to be dead, sometimes covering themselves with signs or banners. The point of a die-in is to disrupt the flow of people on a street or sidewalk to grab the attention of passersby. In more complex forms, fake blood or blood-stained bandages are sometimes used, as well as simulated death throes and writhing from the protesters in an attempt to make the deaths appear more realistic. In other cases, protesters have surrounded the "bodies" in chalk outlines reminiscent of the troped outlines around murder victims. This has been done as an attempt to symbolize that the organization being protested against has "murdered" people. Sometimes, part of the protesting group makes speeches about what is being protested while the rest of the group lies on the ground.
Examples
On 22 April 2006, thousands of protesters lay in the Francisco de Miranda avenue in Caracas, Venezuela, to protest against crime and insecurity during Hugo Chávez's government in a protest by Movimiento Estudiantil called "Acuéstate por la vida". On September 15, 2007, several thousand protested the Iraq war at the Capitol at Washington D.C. Hundreds "sprawled on the ground" on the Capitol lawn at the die-in. Over 190 were arrested, including ten veterans of the Iraq war. The die-in has been used to protest police brutality in the United States. It has been used by organizers in Ferguson, Missouri to protest the St. Louis Police Department's handling of Michael Brown's fatal shooting case in 2014, in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area to protest the killing of Eric Garner, and in Chicago to protest the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. On December 15, 2018, more than 100 members of the Cambridge division of the internationalsocial movementExtinction Rebellion staged a die-in in the Cambridge city centre, to call upon the official county and city authority declaration of a climate emergency. by Extinction Rebellion in Natural History Museum, LondonOn June 5, 2020, a die-in was staged outside Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Chief Adviser Dominic Cummings' house in London to protest Dominic Cummings driving from London to Durham during the COVID-19 lockdown after Durham police claimed last month Cummings may have breached the lockdown rules but said they had no intentions of taking action. Many people had called for Cummings to resign from his role of the PM's chief adviser due to this, but Cummings has not resigned.
