Egypt: Comic Stories Against Harassment

Our friends at Imprint Movement, in collaboration with Al-Moltqa for Consulting and Training, launched a new anti-harassment campaign in Cario’s subways yesterday.

Their press release says:

“The campaign aims aims to communicate to subway passengers and security personnel how sexual harassment affects the entire Egyptian society and not only the girl or the woman who gets sexually harassed.

Imprint has chosen a new approach to draw attention, “Comic Stories”. The comic stories address the challenges that women face created by sexual harassment, the victim blaming culture, to what extend do women and girls feel safe in public space, reactions of the public, its reflection on her personal and professional life and how that effects the entire society. Many posters will be put up to show how the crime of sexual harassment increases when the public don’t interfere to support the girl/woman who get sexually harassed.

The comic story will be circulating around the Cairo subway, It’s Now at Al-Shohadaa, Then it will take place at Mohamed Naguib then Al-Sadat and finally Al-Attaba metro stations. Twelve posters will be put up at Helwan University station, Manshyet Al Sadr Station and Cairo university station as these station are considered to have the most activity and gets huge amount of people daily.

The launching of “What will you do?” campaign is 24th of October, 2015 and ends on the 15th of February 2016.”

Congratulations to them on this innovative campaign!

Learn more about the campaign and see photos here.

Via the Guardian: An illustration depicting a young woman’s experience on a minibus. Illustration: Ahmed Nahby/Mada Masr/Imprint

UPDATE: The Guardian has a great feature article about their campaign. Here is an excerpt:

“Imprint, the organisation behind the campaign, has been raising awareness of sexual harassment through events ranging from one-on-one conversations to workshops, co-founder Abdel Fattah al-Sharkawy explained.

He said participants – both male and female – often found they weren’t aware of what constitutes sexual harassment, and rarely related the term to their own day-to-day experiences.

‘We wanted to make that link’ through the comic campaign, he said.

The group decided to work with comics because ‘they’re catchy and colourful’, drawing people of all ages in to explore the stories they tell, Sharkawy added.

Another image from the series shows male passengers on a minibus reacting to the young woman.

‘This woman can be an influential person in your life,’ the illustration reads. ‘Sexual harassment doesn’t harm her alone, it harms us all.’

They differ from typical public service announcements because they rely on storytelling instead of propagandistic slogans, so they ‘make you think and form an opinion,’ he said.”

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