Hollaback street harrasment - Emily May at TEDxWomen

Emily May talks about her successful efforts to fight street harassment using social media. She is the cofounder of Hollaback!, the anti-street-harassment movement, and a recent winner of TED's The City 2.0 awards.

I was 24 years old when my friend

Samuel Carter looked me in the eye and said,

"You live in a different New York city than I do."

Sam and I had grown up together,
we went to college together,

we lived in New York together.

But unlike me, Sam had never
been hissed at on his way to work.

He never had somebody try
and rub up against him

on a crowded subway car,
and he never had

a stranger walk up to him and tell him that

they wanted to bleep him in his bleep.

Nope. Sam was a dude.

Sam was a dude alright and when he told me that

he lived in a different New York City than I did,

I knew that he was probably right,

and that was so infuriating to both of us.

So Sam and I, along with five of our friends,
resolved to change that.

It was 2005, and we'd recently heard
the story of Tau Nguyen.

Tau was riding the New York city subway

when an older man
sat down across from her,

pulled out his penis,
and started to masturbate.

Tau, pulled out her cell phone camera,

she turned the lens off of her,

right back onto him and took his picture.

She put it up on Flickr,
the photo sharing website,

where it created a city-wide conversation
about public masturbation.

She tried to give it to the police
but they wouldn't even file a report.

What Tau did was a game changer
and we were

so inspired by her work.
We thought,

"Why don't we create a blog?"

So that everyone can do what Tau Nguyen did.

We called it 'Hollaback'
and accepted stories

and photos of street harassment
from around New York city.

But almost immediately,
we were inundated with

requests from around the world.

People wanted us to bring 'Hollaback'
to their town.

They said that street harassment
was a problem everywhere.

They wanted us to be the craigslist
of street harassment,

accepting stories and photos
from all around the world.

But we knew, that if you really wanted

to change the world
you couldn't just have a blog.

You needed local,
on-the-ground activism to go with that.

So we figured out a way to take our model

and give it away.

Today, I'm proud to announce we're in 62 cities,

and 25 countries in 12 different languages.

And now we're growing to address

sexual harassment on college campuses too.

(Applause)

Street harassment is not a new problem.

It has probably existed since the advent of streets. (Laughter)

And efforts to address it are not new either.

In the 1920s there was an effort
called 'The Anti-flirt Club'.

Terrible branding, but it was.

And in the 1970s there was
an effort with the feminist movement.

They brought it into the limelight again.

But what is new today is the solution.

Never before have we been able
to document our stories

of street harassment on-the-go,

and never before have our stories
mattered so much.

With mobile apps, blogs, and social media

stories were amplified
to thousands within minutes.

And this is allowing us to build
movements faster than ever before.

And in 2013, we'll take our free iphone,
android apps

and we will relaunch them in New York city.

So when you share your story
with 'Hollaback' in New York,

you'll also be able to make
an official complaint and

documentation with
the New York city government.

(Applause)

It'll make New York the first city in the world

to document street harassment
and we'll use that data

to better target the problem
of street harassment,

but also to build support for education
and awareness-building campaigns.

It's a solution that would have been
technologically impossible, only 5 years ago.

But if it works, we'll take it
and we'll scale it internationally

providing legitimacy and relief for millions.

But the apps are just one piece of the puzzle.

In the social media world
where everyone has followers,

followers become the new leaders.

At 'Hollaback' we have trained
over 200 activists around the world.

We've given them our platform,
our apps, our blogs

and our social media,
and we've worked with them,

to localize the movements
to their communities.

Together, we have built
a powerful global movement.

And like all global movements,

we don't always agree on how
street harassment's gonna end.

But we do always agree that it must end.

And what we've seen is that the leaders with

the least amount of access to power
are the ones

who are most attracted
to this model of movement building.

Our site leaders are 90% under the age of 30,

they're 44% lesbian,
gay, bisexual or transgender,

a third are people of color,
and a quarter of them have disabilities.

Under their leadership
are sites in Istanbul, Croatia,

and Poland have released a ground-breaking

research on street harassment.

Our site in Edinburgh
has had the Scottish parliament

issue a motion and support of it.

And 'Hollaback' Philly will soon
be getting anti-harassment ads.

You see, online movement building
and online activism,

it's not just about
making it easier to share a petition

or to tell your story to your friends or

to tell your friends
about a cause that you care about.

Online activism is about bringing solutions

to problems that used to be considered hopeless.

And it's about bringing a platform
to leaders who used to be ignored.

And that is a tremendous win.

Thank you.

(Applause)