HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Right to Be (formerly Hollaback!) is a nonprofit organization to raise awareness about and combat harassment, both online and in-person, through intervention trainings, a
photoblog A photoblog (or photolog) is a form of photo sharing and publishing in the format of a blog. It differs from a blog through the predominant use of and focus on photographs rather than text. Photoblogging (the action of posting photos to a photob ...
, and
grassroots A grassroots movement is one that uses the people in a given district, region or community as the basis for a political or economic movement. Grassroots movements and organizations use collective action from the local level to effect change at t ...
initiatives. In May 2010, co-founder Emily May became Hollaback!'s first full-time executive director, and the organization successfully raised close to $15,000 on the internet fundraising platform,
Kickstarter Kickstarter is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of July 2021, ...
, to fund the development and release of the Hollaback! iPhone application. Since then, the organization has received funding from New York Women's Foundation, the Ms. Foundation, Voqal, the Knight Foundation, Ashoka, and the New York City Government.


History

Seven New York City residents, four women and three men, founded the organization in 2005, under the not for profit, Artistic Evolucion, Inc, after a well-publicized occurrence of street harassment prompted them to discuss their own encounters. After being ignored by the police, a woman named Thao Nguyen uploaded a photo she had taken of the man who had masturbated across from her on the subway. This photo appeared on the front page of the New York Daily News, and inspired the seven New York City residents to apply this same method to all forms of street harassment. The women told story after story of their experiences with street harassment, experiences that were surprising to the men in the group because they had never dealt with harassment of that kind. They collectively decided to do something about the issue of street harassment, an issue that affects women, girls, and
LGBTQ ' is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In use since the 1990s, the initialism, as well as some of its common variants, functions as an umbrella term for sexuality and gender identity. The LGBT term is a ...
individuals every day. Hollaback! has held many events around the world designed to raise awareness about street harassment, including film screenings, lectures, demonstrations, and book talks. On October 28, 2010, the New York City Council held the first hearing ever on street harassment. Council Member
Julissa Ferreras Julissa Ferreras-Copeland (born November 2, 1976) is an American politician. She is the former New York City Council Member for the 21st district from 2009 to 2017, which includes portions of College Point, Corona, East Elmhurst, Elmhurst, Fl ...
, who chairs the Women's Issues Committee, called the hearing in order to stress the importance of joining forces in order to take action specifically in New York City. Each panelist recommended three steps towards eliminating street harassment: 1) A citywide study, focusing on the impact of street harassment and girls; 2) a citywide public information campaign that educates all genders and ages that harassment is unacceptable is the second point of action proposed; and 3) establishing "harassment-free zones" in schools in order to raise awareness and support of the movement. Emily May was among the speakers at the hearing; she encouraged women to speak out against street harassment. After this hearing, New York City legislators invested $28,500 in Hollaback!. This investment gave the organization the infrastructure needed to report street harassment incidents to the New York City Council, via their platform "Councilstat." As of August 2012, multiple branches of the Hollaback! blog exist in other U.S. cities including Atlanta, Baltimore, Berkeley, Houston, Des Moines, Chicago, Columbia, Philadelphia and Portland. In 2013, the London branch was involved in
Project Guardian Project Guardian is a joint initiative between British Transport Police (BTP), the Metropolitan Police Service ("the Met"), the City of London Police, and Transport for London (TfL), which aims to combat and increase reporting of sexual harassm ...
, a police initiative to reduce sexual harassment on public transport, including assisting in training of police officers to respond to complaints of sexual assaults.


International Leadership Development - Global Site Leader Program

In January 2011, Hollaback! scaled internationally. As of October 2014, the organization has sites in 79 cities in 26 countries. Prior to launching a new site, site leaders are first trained by Hollaback! employees so that they will have the skills necessary to operate their own blog. Future site leaders are given the chance to interact with one another and the Hollaback! team, host events, and build partnerships with community members and media outlets. Even after site leaders successfully launch their own branch of the organization, they remain active participants in the Hollaback! community. The various branches work in coalition to further develop the organization, translate the Hollaback! website, and create shared resources. In addition, site leaders receive monthly training in topics ranging from blogging to rape culture to holding events. Hollaback! provides guidance in bystander intervention the form of "The Five D's" - Direct, Distract, Delegate, Delay, and Document.


HeartMob

HeartMob is a platform to help end online harassment.


College Initiative

The Hollaback! "College Initiative" is a campaign that aims to end sexual harassment on college campuses.http://www.indiegogo.com/HollabackAgainstCampusHarassment To do this, Hollaback! will give students the means to submit their experiences of harassment through the free iPhone and Droid apps, as well as their campus-specific Hollaback! website, which will link to a mapping system that will allow Hollaback! to track incidents of campus harassment. Hollaback! will use the mapping system to demonstrate the impact of harassment to campus staff and administrators. When victims of harassment share their experiences on the Hollaback! website, their stories are read by hundreds of other people. Reading about incidents of harassment has often inspired individuals to become enraged and seek change. The "College Initiative," like the initial Hollaback! mission, "will create a safe, action-oriented response to campus harassment and assault. By using data to establish the case against campus harassment, Hollaback!'s social change efforts will ultimately result in significant improvements in campus policy and a reduction in sexual harassment against students."


Anti-harassment video

In October 2014, Rob Bliss Creative created a video which showed Shoshana Roberts, a white woman in New York City, being harassed by men. In one scene, a man followed Shoshana for five minutes. The video included a call to donate to Hollaback! in order to stop this harassment. While 30–40% of the incidents of harassment in the video are perpetrated by white men, men of color are on camera for the largest portion of the video. Numerous writers accused the video of being racist. The organization later apologized for the "racial bias" in the video. A petition at
change.org Change.org is a worldwide nonprofit petition website, based in California, US, operated by the San Francisco-based company of the same name, which has over 400 million users and offers the public the ability to promote the petitions they care abo ...
was created to ask Hollaback! to release the entire 10 hours of footage, so people can see if it the two-minute video was selectively edited to be racist. Hollaback! was not able to release the footage because they didn't make it or own it, it was created by Rob Bliss. Response to the video has included rape and death threats to subject of the video and some journalists defended the behavior shown in the video, in some cases adding catcalls of their own.


References


External links

*
Barnard Center For Research on Women
* {{Cite news , last = Edozien , first = Frankie , title = Make it a flash in the pen , work = NY Post , date = 1 May 2007 , url = http://www.nypost.com/seven/05012007/news/regionalnews/make_it_a_flash_in_the_pen_regionalnews_frankie_edozien.htm , url-status = dead , archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20070603015832/http://www.nypost.com/seven/05012007/news/regionalnews/make_it_a_flash_in_the_pen_regionalnews_frankie_edozien.htm , archive-date = 3 June 2007 Photoblogs American blogs Internet properties established in 2005 Feminist blogs Feminist protests Feminist organizations in the United States