People always think it's a reference to Gwen Stefani. It's not—no disrespect to Gwen Stefani.
We were launched around 2005 in New York. If you remember, back then cellphone cameras were a brand new technology. It was very exciting. It was terrible and pixilated, but very exciting.
A young woman on a subway in New York was on her way to work when someone started publicly masturbating in front of her. This had happened to her before, but she realized that in her pocket she had this brand new phone with a camera. She thought that if she took the guy's picture, she then would have evidence and the police might actually do something about it. She took a picture of him. He posed for the photo; that's how flagrant he was in what he did. It clearly was not his first time. She brought the photo to the NYPD and asked them to please try to get the guy. They said that millions of people live in New York and asked how they were supposed to find this guy.
This was prior to social media in the way that we currently understand it. She posted it to Flickr, which is—as hopefully you know—a sort of photo-sharing site, one of the first social media sites, and it went viral. It ended up on the cover of the New York Daily News. He was eventually apprehended. Interestingly enough, he was released and has been apprehended just recently, in the past year, for doing it again to someone else.
What was important about this story is that when a young woman used what she had at her disposal to start a conversation, it sparked a massive conversation within the city of New York, where you had men saying, “As if this happens to women...”, and you had women saying, “As if you didn't know this is the reality of what it means to walk down the street in New York and to take public transit.”
A group of women and men in New York thought that maybe this new mobile technology stuff was the answer, because you had a way of capturing this problem in the moment. Initially, the site was started just for people in the city of New York to capture this in real time, but that quickly morphed. They heard from people around the world who were saying that this was not a problem unique to New York and that they had it in India, Europe, and Latin America. It was happening all over the place, and they asked if they could participate as well.
Now our current format is that anybody around the world can start a chapter. We are now in 60 cities on five continents around the world—I just counted them this morning—powered by over 300 activists, overwhelmingly through unpaid volunteer labour. Over half of the people who run a Hollaback! site are considered youths, so they're under the age of 30 or 25. Young people are running this movement.
As for how it works, we have an app that you can download for free. We have a chapter here in Ottawa. You can submit your story, such as how you were walking down Rideau Street and a guy drove by and yelled at you from his car or a guy followed you for three blocks asking you for your number and it really pissed you off. You submit your story to us, we approve it, and not only does it get put on the site, but a little dot goes onto a map, and we can actually start tracking where street harassment happens in the city. This is giving us real data in real time about what's going on in our community.
That has given us data to take to places. For example, when we had our municipal election a few years ago, we went to them with the kinds of things that we were seeing and experiencing. We were able to contact everyone running for council to say that this was what was going on in their ward and to ask them what they were going to do about it.
Here's what's important for me. When we first launched, people asked us about being afraid that we were going to get sued by the guy whose picture we took for being a creep. That was their assumption. It was around libel. Also, they asked what the power was of telling someone's story. They said, “A girl just vented on your website, but what difference does that make?” Well, by creating a space for people to tell their stories, we're getting data that we've never had before.
We were around for about two years and then decided to look at the themes we saw coming up over and over again in Ottawa. What we saw overwhelmingly was about public transit. That's what I want to talk about with you very briefly, because most people, most students, are taking public transit. We live in a city where you have a U-Pass. This is common on campuses across the country; there's an assumption that you're going to take transit.
Transit in Ottawa, I can say, remains very unsafe for women and young folks, queer folks, people with disabilities, and elders. Specifically, what we found was that the overwhelming number of stories we got were about being harassed on the bus, while waiting for the bus, or on the way off the bus and heading home.
We took that information and approached OC Transpo, which is the public transit authority here in Ottawa, and they were more than a little dismissive. They were actually outraged that we dared to say on our website that there were high levels of harassment on transit, because they were not getting reports. In their defence, here you have a crop of privileged people who don't take transit. Most of them were men who were, like, “We don't get reports of this stuff, so how do we know you're not just making this up?”
We held a town hall. We got people to start sharing their stories. It just exploded in the city. Women were coming forward and saying that they didn't know of a single woman who didn't have at least one story of a guy who was leering at them for the whole 40 minutes they were on the bus—minimum.
We continued to push them, both by using the media and by meeting with them monthly. What we wanted was a bystander intervention campaign. We wanted ads telling people that if they saw somebody harassing someone, they had a role to play. We had to concede to a campaign.... For those of you who know transit at all, you might have seen ads that say “if you feel harassed” or “if you feel threatened”. That's a result of the work that we did with them for three years, pushing them to talk about the fact that if they would acknowledge that this happens, people would talk about it.
We also wanted an anonymous reporting mechanism. We knew that the vast majority of people did not report because they were concerned about stigma, about victim blaming, about all the stuff that my colleagues have mentioned already. In fact, we were correct. Ottawa has the first anonymous reporting mechanism in the country. Apparently, it might be the first for all of North America, which is very exciting. Lo and behold, most of the things that are getting reported to them are things that they had never had reported previously, including high levels of people being leered at and of people being groped.
It actually led to the apprehension of a serial sexual assault predator who had been going up to women and kissing young girls waiting for the bus for school. Multiple women reported it through the anonymous reporting mechanism. They went to the cameras and, sure enough, they caught him and he was apprehended.
Once again, you create a space for people to tell their stories, and young women want to tell their stories, but we need to do something with that information.
I want to leave you with some stats as well. Hollaback! HQ is in New York. They got some funding. It's the only chapter in the world that is actually funded to do its work. They worked with Cornell University to gather global statistics on street harassment, which was really important.
What they found was that 88% of Canadians had been harassed before the age of 18, which means that 88% of women in Canada had been harassed at least once before they were even legally an adult. Fifty per cent of the respondents had been groped or fondled at least once in the past year, which is pretty tremendous. Forty per cent said that a result of street harassment was that it made them late to school. It made them late for class because they either had to do a detour or they had to collect themselves before they could go to their lecture or classroom.
Locally, we had our own research, which was not funded by the wonderful folks at Cornell but was still pretty sound. What we found, which was important and builds off what Maïra said, was that only 6% of people who had been harassed had someone intervene on their behalf. That's really important when you consider that the nature of street harassment is being in a public space. If you're on a bus, there's at least you, the perpetrator, and the driver. If you're waiting for a bus, there's probably someone else around.
We have very low levels of intervention because people are not recognizing it as a form of violence. They don't get that street harassment is on a continuum. They're afraid of escalation. They think that only crazy people harass women at the bus stop and that if they intervene, the crazy person is going to come after them. It's a sort of self-preservation.
We also found that people just don't know what to do, so we have a program, and our response is not criminalization. We're actually opposed to the criminalization of street harassment, because most of the things we're experiencing are already against the law, so that's not the issue. The issue is getting people to intervene, whether that involves reporting or whatnot.
I want to end by telling you about our program. It's called “I've Got Your Back”. We teach the four Ds of intervention: direct, delegate, distract, and delay.
To give you an example, if I see Maïra being harassed and it's considered fairly low level—if he's just chatting with her and I feel safe enough—I can go up to him and say, “She doesn't know you. She's not interested, so let it go”, or I can go up to her and say, “Do you know him or do you need me to call somebody?” I can intervene directly if it's safe.
You can delegate if it's not safe. Maybe you're tiny and not a tall person like I am, whose job it is to yell at people about the patriarchy—