Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Join International Anti-Street Harassment Week!

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Will you join us for the 8th annual International Anti-Street Harassment Week and demand safe public spaces for all?

Last year groups from 36 different countries joined in (here’s the wrap-up report).

Get involved:

  1. Advertise the week to your networks and encourage them to take action, whether that is sharing a story, putting info on social media, or organizing/attending offline action like a march, workshop or rally.
  2. Participate! And tell us what you plan to do.
  3. Join the 24 hour tweetathon on April 4! #EndSH

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Three Ways to Help Stop Street Harassment in 2017

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A new year is upon us and if you are looking for ways to get involved in making the world a better, safer and more equitable place, we can help! Here are three things you can do this year, immediately, to help raise awareness about street harassment — and work to end it.

1. Apply to join our first Blog Correspondents cohort of 2017. This volunteer position entails writing a monthly article (500-800 words) about street harassment and/or activism in your community. This is an important way to show this is a problem all over the world… and that there are people all over the world dedicated to ending it. The position runs from January (now!) to April 2017, apply today.

2. Plan to take action during International Anti-Street Harassment Week. From April 2 to 8, 2017, hundreds of groups and tens of thousands of people all over the world will join together to raise awareness about street harassment. This is the 7th year and in the past, groups in up to 41 countries have participated by marching, wheatpasting, sidewalk chalking, holding workshops and rallies, writing op-eds and holding tweet chats. How will you take part?

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3. Spread the word about the National Street Harassment Hotline. You never know who will need this toll-free 24/7 support — spread the word over social media or in person about the hotline. You can also donate to help cover the cost of running it in 2017.

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HABITAT 3: A Day of Connections

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img_8917Hello from my final day at HABITAT 3 in Quito, Ecuador.

The two big highlights were:

1) Co-presenting this morning on a panel about crowdsourcing and community engagement with Elsa D’Silva of Safecity from India and Rosy Mondardini of Open Seventeen in Switzerland. Even with an 8 a.m. start time, about 40 people joined us — and unlike most other panels, we respected the time and spent 1/3rd of our session on Q&A with the audience. People were interested to hear more about how we collect data (through crowdsource mapping, story collection at workshops, stories submitted online, and surveys) and how we have been able to create concrete changes in our communities with those data.

2) The other highlight was meeting up with two activists I have emailed with for years — Alma in Italy and Alice in Brazil. We all realized last night we were all in town and arranged to meet today. Elsa joined me and so then we had anti-street harassment activists from four countries, four continents all together. It was very exciting!! Each of their groups participate in International Anti-Street Harassment Week each year, which is cool.

Alice invited us to make a video with her organization’s “super hero” to talk about creative ways to deal with street harassers (video to come).

I also got to meet Marcelo from ActionAid when he came to my panel and I went to his; he helped galvanize many of their ActionAid Safe Cities groups to join International Anti-Street Harassment Week this year.

Doing this work can sometimes feel really isolating when so much of it is done online, from my home, from buses and airports and hotel rooms, and so to actually meet people who are doing similar work and to put a face to an email address I have seen pop up over the years was so exciting!

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#DoYouKazoo Anti-Street Harassment Action by #BreakthroughCatalysts

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Prepare Inc. - Debunk Myths 5A committed group of people, brought together by Breakthrough Catalyst trainings, strive to use collective knowledge, energy, connections and commitment to end/reduce street harassment through cultural change. Breakthrough Catalysts and friends want to help raise awareness and promote a culture shift that discredits common street harassment myths and provide easy and effective responses to invalidate them with our posters and social media. We stand in solidarity with other organizations and individuals during Sexual Assault Awareness Month and Anti-Street Harassment Week, from April 10th to 16th, 2016.

Prepare Inc. - Debunk Myths 3We chose the symbol and sound of a Kazoo to promote the idea that tools work best to call out rape culture and myths about gender violence, not to prevent it. The use of the Kazoo is inspired by a joke by comic Cameron Esposito, who wishes for a rape Kazoo instead of a rape whistle, in the hopes that its sound is more appealing and will garner help if she is attacked.

Prepare Inc. - Debunk Myths 4Key concepts:

  • Reinventing the “rape whistle” as a Kazoo
  • “Sounding the alarm” about the issue of street harassment
  • Changing culture through positive humor (vs. put-down humor) as Kazoos are often thought of as whimsical, fun, non-serious musical instruments anyone can play. Kazoos have a history of use as tools of social protest.

Feel free to use and share these images with the hashtag #DoYouKazoo!

Prepare Inc. - Debunk Myths

Karen Chasen is the Vice President of Prepare Inc.

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