WEBVTT

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I was 24 years old when my friend

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Samuel Carter looked me in the eye and said,

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

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

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we lived in New York together.

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

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He never had somebody try
and rub up against him

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on a crowded subway car,
and he never had

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a stranger walk up to him and tell him that

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they wanted to bleep him in his bleep.

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Nope. Sam was a dude.

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Sam was a dude alright and when he told me that

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

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I knew that he was probably right,

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and that was so infuriating to both of us.

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

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

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Tau was riding the New York city subway

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when an older man
sat down across from her,

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pulled out his penis,
and started to masturbate.

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Tau, pulled out her cell phone camera,

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she turned the lens off of her,

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right back onto him and took his picture.

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

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

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

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What Tau did was a game changer
and we were

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so inspired by her work.
We thought,

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"Why don't we create a blog?"

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So that everyone can do what Tau Nguyen did.

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We called it 'Hollaback'
and accepted stories

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and photos of street harassment
from around New York city.

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But almost immediately,
we were inundated with

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requests from around the world.

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

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They said that street harassment 
was a problem everywhere.

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They wanted us to be the craigslist
of street harassment,

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accepting stories and photos
from all around the world.

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But we knew, that if you really wanted

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

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

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So we figured out a way to take our model

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and give it away.

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

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and 25 countries in 12 different languages.

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And now we're growing to address

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sexual harassment on college campuses too.

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(Applause)

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Street harassment is not a new problem.

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

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And efforts to address it are not new either.

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

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Terrible branding, but it was.

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

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They brought it into the limelight again.

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But what is new today is the solution.

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Never before have we been able
to document our stories

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of street harassment on-the-go,

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and never before have our stories
mattered so much.

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With mobile apps, blogs, and social media

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stories were amplified
to thousands within minutes.

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

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

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and we will relaunch them in New York city.

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

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

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documentation with
the New York city government.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Applause)

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

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to document street harassment
and we'll use that data

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to better target the problem
of street harassment,

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

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

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

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providing legitimacy and relief for millions.

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But the apps are just one piece of the puzzle.

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In the social media world
where everyone has followers,

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followers become the new leaders.

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

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

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

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to localize the movements
to their communities.

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Together, we have built
a powerful global movement.

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And like all global movements,

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

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But we do always agree that it must end.

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And what we've seen is that the leaders with

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the least amount of access to power
are the ones

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who are most attracted
to this model of movement building.

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

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

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

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Under their leadership
are sites in Istanbul, Croatia,

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and Poland have released a ground-breaking

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research on street harassment.

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Our site in Edinburgh
has had the Scottish parliament

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issue a motion and support of it.

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

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You see, online movement building
and online activism,

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

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or to tell your story to your friends or

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

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Online activism is about bringing solutions

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to problems that used to be considered hopeless.

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

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And that is a tremendous win.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)