Campaign Duration: 7 days (19th-25th April, 2020)
The International Anti-Street Sexual Harassment Week (ASHW) is a week-long global campaign, where organisations from 40 countries collectively raise awareness about street sexual harassment. The ASHW was pioneered by a US-based non-profit organisation, Stop Street Harassment (SSH), which is dedicated to documenting and ending gender-based street harassment worldwide. This year, Pink Legal participated in the 10th anniversary of the ASHW.
For Pink Legal’s ASHW Campaign, we took a three-pronged approach:
Legal awareness and education through informative, explanatory videos about different forms of street sexual harassment, and rights and remedies against such harassment;
Interactive crowd-sourced
placard campaign, where female college students were encouraged to speak up about street sexual harassment faced by them; and
Quiz on street sexual harassment laws in India.
Pink Legal published a series of 5 informative and explanatory videos on the digital platforms YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook, where I explained the law on different forms of street sexual harassment in a very easy-to-understand manner. The break-up of the series is given below:
Explanation on different types of sexual harassment (i.e. physical, verbal, and non-verbal)
Eve-teasing (legal provisions, remedies, and practical tips)
Molestation/groping in public transport (legal provisions, remedies, and practical tips)
Physical stalking (legal provisions, remedies, and practical tips)
Public indecency, such as masturbation in front of a woman in public (legal provisions, remedies, and practical tips)
In our placard campaign, we asked college-going girls to send us a picture holding a placard, stating the location and type of street sexual harassment that they have faced. Through the placard campaign, we wanted to encourage young girls to #breakthesilence about sexual harassment, and drive home the point that it is not their fault. In total, we received 95 responses from 9 different cities in India, namely- Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Jaipur, Nagpur, Cuttack, and Vishakhaptnam. A sample of the responses is given below:
Most women who have faced sexual harassment are reluctant to speak about it. Although we gave the participants the option to either show or hide their face for the placard campaign, 90% of the participants chose to hide their face, and more than 50% participants did not wish to be identified on social media.
On the last day of the ASHW (i.e. 25th April), we conducted an online quiz on Instagram, where Pink Legal has garnered 3000 followers. The quiz was based on all the laws about the different forms of street sexual harassment that we had covered through our video series. The purpose of the quiz was to encourage our audience to know their legal rights in a fun, interactive way. We had more than 400 participants for the quiz and were happy to see that most of them were able to give the right answers, and 53% of the participants said they learnt something new through the quiz!
We asked our audience to share with us how they feel when they view the photos of our placard campaign. Most of them replied saying they felt a sense of unity, and were relieved to know that they were not alone:
Our audience also thanked us for our series of legal awareness videos, and their satisfaction is our motivation: