HollabackPHILLY Launches New Anti-Street Harassment Campaign

HollaBACKPhilly, a project of Feminist Public Works, launched its new transit ad campaign on Tuesday. It’s a new, expanded transit ad campaign with a total of 25 ads in the interior of subway cars, on the subway platforms, and in bus shelters across the city.

“We decided to do the campaign as a transit campaign because we really wanted to reach  people where they are in public spaces,” said Anna Kegler, deputy director of Feminist Public Works and HollabackPHILLY.

The first week of April is Anti-Street Harassment Week and April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. The advertisements are designed to familiarize the public with the term “street harassment” (gender-based harassment by strangers in public spaces) and define it as a solvable problem.

“We want people to start thinking about street harassment as something that’s actually stoppable, something that’s not inevitable,” Kegler said.

This campaign is an expansion of the small 6-advertisement pilot campaign that HollabackPHILLY launched on April 1, 2013 in the Philadelphia subway system, which ran with the minimum allowable budget for a transit ad campaign in Philadelphia. SEPTA kept the ads up in the subway for an extra month.