It’s May and our focus this month is on combatting harassment. In an international survey, 85 percent of American women reported experiencing street harassment by age 17. Hollaback! is an organization providing tools and resources to ignite public conversations and develop strategies to end harassment. We sat down with Emily May, co-founder and executive director of Hollaback!, to talk about the cellphone pic that sparked a movement, new legislation, and what you can do online and in the streets.

Shrill Society: I first learned of Hollaback! in 2014. By then, the organization had already been around for almost a decade. Can you talk about the founding of Hollaback! and your personal pathway to advocacy?

Emily May: Hollaback! started back in 2005. I was 24 years old. My friends and I―there were seven of us total―we were sitting around talking about our experiences with harassment. We felt like, when we walked on and didn’t say anything, we felt weak. When we would respond back with a witty response, it would just escalate. There was no real solution to harassment. We started to think, “This isn’t something we put up with in the workplace. Why are we putting up with it on the street and in other forms of public spaces?” We were inspired by a young woman named Thao Nguyen, who was riding the New York City subway when a man sat down across from her and started to publicly masturbate. Thao pulled out her cellphone camera and took his picture with the idea of taking it to the police. But when she took it to the police, the police were like, “We’re sorry, but there is nothing we can do. He’s probably seven or eight stops away already.” So she put that picture on Flickr. It went viral and made it to the front cover of the New York Daily News. We were inspired by her ability to turn the lens away from her and onto the person who was harassing her using this tool that we had in our pockets―this newfangled cellphone camera that nobody had really figured out what it would mean for the world, for society, for any of us...

Shrill Society: I think we’re still trying to figure that out.

Right. So, we took our experiences of harassment and turned them into a blog and that has scaled out into a global movement that’s now in 21 cities and 16 countries around the world.

Many people can recognize catcalling as a form of harassment in public space. What are some other forms that may go underrecognized?

Verbal harassment is definitely a form of harassment, but also non-verbal harassment might be things like gestures, grunts, animal noises, lip smacking, lip licking. All of that kind of stuff is under the rubric of harassment, as well as physical forms of harassment. Things that start to even blur into assault, which is groping, public masturbation, all of these things are broadly under the umbrella we use to talk about sexual harassment. I would also point out that sexual harassment is on a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum may be comments and things of that nature and the other end is sexual assault.

Hollaback! Suggests bystander intervention can be a best practice for stopping these forms of harassment. Can you talk about what that means and what resources Hollaback! offers to educate people on effective bystander intervention?

When we started to tell our own stories about harassment, we started to map them globally. We looked at the map and we thought, “This is pretty depressing. Is there anything remotely positive that happens when it comes to being harassed?” We started to think that the only positive stories we ever received were when somebody stood up and helped somebody else out. Back in 2012, we partnered with Green Dot [bystander program] and started to adapt their training to respond to harassment in public spaces. That continues to be a big part of our work. When it comes to things like harassment in public spaces, there’s not a lot of systems in place to address the problem and the systems that are in place like the police, for example, have their own histories of harassment and communities don’t necessarily feel safer with them around. I think, when it comes to solving a problem as big as harassment, it really takes a community approach. People looking out for people is something as old as time, but, when it comes to sexual harassment, they often forget how. Bystander intervention is very simply equipping them with tools so they can directly or indirectly intervene and support folks who are getting harassed. 

Image via ihollaback.org

Let’s talk more about community approaches. Hollaback! was also an early leader in the fight against online harassment, with the creation of HeartMob in 2013. We’re living in a time when the President of the United States is literally engaging in cyber bullying daily. What shift in our culture needs to take place to move us closer to a world without harassment?

Quite plainly we need to end sexism, racism, homophobia, and other systems of oppression. That is ultimately the root of all forms of harassment. Online harassment is a relatively nascent field, but its root is an old, old, old problem. Certainly there are different tactics and approaches involved. Social media companies are quickly becoming the litigators of what is and isn’t acceptable to say in public space, but ultimately they are only one small part of the solution. I think we as everyday people need to stand up and call out harassment as we see it.

To dive into the particulars of that social media component, Twitter can be such a hotbed of harassment and you all have created a tool especially for the platform. Can you talk about the HeartBot and how it works?

HeartMob itself is designed so that when you report your experience of harassment you can activate a community of folks who will help you out in any way that you choose―whether that is up-voting your video to counteract all the down-votes, sending you a supportive message, reporting the offending user to the platform where it happened, documenting your harassment. The HeartBot is an extension of that. When you see harassment happening on Twitter, you can flag it and every time that person chooses to perpetuate harassment a dollar gets donated to efforts to end online harassment.

Hollaback! recently collaborated with The People’s Supper to host a series of gatherings. What is the goal of introducing dinners into the framework?

Even before the 2016 election, we were looking around at everything that was happening and really the broader rupture in our society. At the time, I assumed Hillary Clinton would win, but regardless of who won, that election cycle uncovered what was so deeply broken about our country. One of the impacts of harassment is that people feel like they are not fully seen, they’re not fully heard, and they’re not fully able to be themselves and communicate who they are safely. We thought, “What if the dinner table is the newfangled technology of 2016/2017? What if we’ve gone so hard on this technological front that actually it’s time to swing back and teach people how to sit across from each other and have a conversation? Not about politics or their differences, but rather about their stories and their common humanity.” The reality is that everyone has a story, everyone has a moment when they felt like they’ve been treated as less than or not worthy or even harassed. As we start to tell those stories, share those moments, we’re able to see each other with more complexity and, as a result, more kindness than our news media cycle would ever allow for.

What’s upcoming for Hollaback! that you are excited to share?

We are really on a mission to train a ton of people in bystander intervention and how to respond to harassment. We helped to support New York City in passing the first law nationally that mandates employers to have a sexual harassment training if they have more than 15 employees in the city and requires that bystander intervention be a part of it. So we are currently rolling that out across New York City and are excited to do that work. We’re interested in passing more laws like that nationally, so that those sexual harassment trainings that have existed for so long but haven’t reduced harassment meaningfully in the workplace can be adapted to create real impact. We can empower everyday folks in their own workplace to take action and not just delegate 100% of it to managers, although managers certainly have a role in it as well.

What are the avenues if someone wants to get involved with Hollaback!?

You can visit us at ihollaback.org. There you can tell your story. You can download our free apps. You can sign up for trainings in bystander intervention or conflict de-escalation and become part of our larger community.

Want to hear more from women leading the charge on the issues that matter to you most? Read our previous interviews with Ashley Louise of Ladies Get Paid, Rebecca Lehrer and Amy S. Choi of The Mash-Up Americans, and Polly Rodriguez of Unbound.