Transcriber: Yeon Choi Reviewer: Capa Girl
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 conversationabout 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 wasan 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)