Hollaback's Emily May Talks About Stopping Street Harassment

Ever walked down the street to the hoots and catcalls of total strangers? Ever been privy to a total stranger's nasty bits on the subway? There is a way to stop it. Hollaback is a movement dedicated to ending street harassment using mobile technology. It started in Brooklyn six years ago, and has since spread to dozens of other cities around the world. They just launched a new "I've Got Your Back" campaign, a mobile app to empower bystanders who want to intervene in street harassment. We spoke to executive director Emily May about her mission to make the streets safer.

I've been really interested in talking to you because as a female, and a cyclist, I've had my fair share of street harassment. I want to start by asking you to give me the basics for people who haven't heard a lot about Hollaback.  What do you do and how do you describe it? We started Hollaback back in 2005 in Brooklyn. It was a conversation among friends, three men and four of women. We were just talking about street harassment and how often it happens, and how we felt so powerless. How when we would walk around, we'd feel weak, we get yelled at, the situation would escalate…At the time, there was this young woman named Thao Nguyen who was sitting on the subway. A guy sat down across from her, pulled out his penis, and started to masturbate. So Thao, not knowing what to do, wanted to take his picture with these newfangled cell phone cameras that had just came out at the time, and take it to the police. But when she took it to the police, the police were like, 'Sorry, there's nothing we can do.' So, she put it up on Flickr, told her story, and the photo went viral. And it turned out the guy owned two raw foods restaurants called Quintessence, and it ignited this city-wide conversation about public masturbation, it was on the front cover of the Daily News. We were so inspired by what Thao had done, and we thought, This is amazing. People need to be talking about this, people need to be telling their stories. We had no idea that we weren't the only ones. That this wasn't our fault. This is a big problem. And so we decided to sort of take what Thao had done, put it up on a blog, and start sharing our stories. It's six years later, and about a year ago I left my full-time job to make Hollaback happen full-time.

Well, Congratulations! Thank you. It's been an amazing ride. I left my job with no guarantee of funding. I just knew I felt like I had to do it. I felt like somebody had to do something, and that the time was right to really take this conversation to the next level. Since then we've launched a cell phone app, a Droid app, a new website. Most exciting to me is that we're now in 24 cities internationally. We're growing to another 14 in August, which will bring it up to 38 cities internationally, in 14 different countries, in 8 different languages, with 100 different activists that have done this work. And the model is really about getting people to tell their stories. It's a very old-school way of making social change. It's the way social change has always happened. With Hollaback, though, we're not just telling our stories once in front of a few people. We're telling our stories to a really broad audience. We're mapping those stories, we're documenting those stories, we're using those stories as the basis of research to show how much street harassment happens, how street harassment hurts. And we're also using those stories to build a community, which is where all of our site leaders internationally come in. And they've taken the Hollaback model, which is about storytelling through technology, to apply it to their own communities. A core part of what we do is, as powerful as the technology is, it's only one way to tell stories, only one way to make social change. So, all of our local site leaders have been really active in doing on-the-ground work, whether it's with local legislators, whether it's doing film screenings or mud-painting or whatever works best in their area—they've all been really active in bringing awareness to this issue in their community and partnering with local community groups.

In New York specifically, which is where Hollaback started, what is the most common story that you would hear? What kind of harassment takes place and how should New Yorkers deal with it? I know that's a big question. Probably he most persistent form of harassment is verbal harassment. But I think what's much more compelling isn't the type of harassment but the consistency in responding to the harassment, which is that almost inevitably, people will, when telling their story, include a part of it where they try to explain why it wasn't their fault. So: "I was wearing a puffy coat!" "It was the middle of the day!" "My friend was with me." They try to explain why it wasn't their fault, very consistently. The other part of it, too, that's been really heartbreaking, is that they also start to explain how other people were around them and they saw this, and they didn't do anything. And that's the premise of our new campaign, which is called "I've Got Your Back," which is all about restoring these values of people caring about each other in public space, and acknowledging that as New Yorkers, when we see somebody drop their hat and we pick it up and run along after them and hand it to them, or we see a parent struggling to get a door open with a baby stroller, we help them by opening that door. But consistently, what we see on the site is that when we see somebody being harassed, or even worse, sexually assaulted, we tend to look the other way. I don't think it's because New Yorkers are uniquely cruel-hearted or cold-hearted. I think it's just that people don't know what to do. With this campaign we're launching, we're really trying to teach people, if you see this happening to somebody, don't look at them like they have two heads. Don't look at them like they probably asked for it. Go up to them, ask them if they are okay, and if there is anything you can do.

It's like the MTA—if you see something, say something. Exactly.

You've actually worked with the MTA on some subway ads about harassment, right? We're in a collaborative that Hollaback helped to co-found back in 2008 with New Yorkers for Safe Transit. In coordination with them, we were able to pressure the MTA to get ads up onto the subway. They're the "A crowded train is no excuse for an improper touch" ads. They are actually about to change those ads to say, Not only if this happens to you contact an MTA worker or a police officer, but if you see it happen to somebody, contact an MTA worker or a police officer. That's part of really engaging bystanders in this way and helping people to understand that it takes a community to make a community a good place to live. I even liken it to those, If you see a pregnant woman, give her your seat! ads. It's stuff that's so obvious. But we get in our own heads and we forget what we're supposed to do.

Have you been able to track changes in the way that people are reporting these harassment issues to you, or in the amount of I've Got Your Back reports that you're getting? We've seen a tremendous surge in these stories over the past six years, particularly within the past year. It's very challenging because it's user-reported. It's challenging for us to know, are more people learning about Hollaback? Are more people feeling like their story matters, that street harassment isn't okay? Or are there more instances that are happening? We are seeing a huge surge, and I think what's really interesting, and what's shaking out in the reports in New York City, is that the areas in which it is happening most are the areas with the highest population density. We see this happening most in Midtown, Wall Street, Village areas. I think that runs against the assumption that people have, that it's going to happen most in lower-income communities. And that's just not what the data is playing out to show, which makes sense. It's not one kind of person that's doing the harassing. It's part of a bigger culture where degrading women is seen as okay on some level, and that that bigger culture is pervasive among all kinds of people whether they are Wall Street people, commuter people, people living in low-income communities. All these places are where this culture plays out. It's really population density that's a bigger indicator for it than anything else. But New York City has a tremendously dense population, so in many ways we are in a hotbed for these instances to happen.

Do you want to tell me a little bit about your mobile apps that are making it easier for people to share their stories? So we conceptualized the iPhone and the Droid app as kind of like, when you get street harassed, you do really want this badass response. Typically, in my experience, I come up with the wittiest, most awesome things that I could say when I am exactly 2 blocks away from whatever happened. We've actually heard stories of people—there was one girl on her bike and somebody said something to her, and she rode three blocks down the street, came up with the most awesome thing to say ever, turned her bike around, rode back, and said it. Which I think is just incredible. But anyways, we really wanted this real-time response. Sometimes, depending on what the situation is, there is no shame in the fact that sometimes the safest thing to do is just to keep walking. And in those instances, you still want a response. You still need a response. Psychologically. You can't just shove it in and hope that it will go away. We developed these apps to give folks a real-time response to the harassment that they are experiencing. It enables us to GeoLocate where it happened to them, identify the type of harassment that happened to them, and then once they are home they have the opportunity to really tell the rest of their story.

So what happens when you go to the app? There's a log-in. Once you log in you don't have to do it time and time again. There's a log-in and we have their email address and we sent them a Ping-back email that says, We got your story, we heard that you were harassed, tell us the rest of your story. We're about to reconfigure the app so you can enter your story on the app if you so choose, so instead of an automatic GeoLocation, you can put where you were later. We found that a lot of folks kind of wanted to get to work or get to the bar or to wherever they were going, and then push the buttons.

I know you have a whole section of this on your website that goes into great detail, but just for a basic idea, can you give me general tips on how to fight back, how to deal with harassment if you are victim to it? I think there's this really human desire to want to have the right thing to say. To want to be able to do the right thing, and to believe that if we have the right thing to say or if we do the right thing, then maybe it won't happen the next time. The key to it not happening the next time is to get harassers to stop harassing. As an individual, unfortunately, it's hard. Doing the right thing might not necessarily prevent it. That being said, there is sort of best practices in what to do and what not to do when you're harassed. One of those is to just say, very firmly but in a non-escalated way, "That's not okay." And to keep going, and to not engage them, to not allow it to escalate. But to just be very clear and very firm that it is not okay.

I think another really, really important part that I found in my own trajectory with street harassment is that, when we started Hollaback, I just kind of stomached street harassment. Most people in New York City just kind of put up with it. I just thought it was part of living in New York City, and that if it hurt I wasn't strong, and I was definitely intent on being a strong, badass, New York City girl. But what I found that would happen was that, when I would see a group of guys on the street maybe, or I would be alone on the street and a guy would be walking to pass me, my body would tense up a little bit, I would become hypersensitive, I would worry that they were going to say something, what they were going to say...I feel like harassers really prey on vulnerability, and I think that in those moments, I was letting off this air of vulnerability.

I think being young makes you more vulnerable, I think being LGBTQ makes you more vulnerable. Being a girl makes you more vulnerable. There are lots of uncontrollable components that can make you more vulnerable. But there's also your vibe, you know? When we started Hollaback, and what we've consistently seen with people who have worked on this project with us, they come because they are totally sick of being harassed. And then within six months or so of really documenting their experiences with it, and acknowledging that it hurts and acknowledging that that's totally not okay, all of us have really experienced reductions in how often we experience harassment. It's a different vibe to know that you have a response, that your voice is that response. To know that you're not alone, that this happens to everybody. It changes the way you experience the harassment itself. And so, I would encourage harassers to stop harassing and I would encourage people who experience harassment to really start to share their stories. And to own the fact that sometimes you can put up with it and sometimes it really hurts, and that that's okay, and you're not alone. And that there's a whole community of people out there that have your back.