Harassment happens every day. Ignoring it shouldn’t.
Client:
Greater Manchester Moving
Project:
Right To The Streets
Everyday sexual harassment affects women and girls whenever they are in public spaces. It can make them feel unsafe, alter where they go, and affect whether they feel comfortable walking, wheeling or cycling alone.
And it happens far too often.
As part of the Safer Streets programme in Trafford, Greater Manchester Moving wanted to challenge the behaviours that make women and girls feel unsafe while being active in public spaces.
But making those spaces safer couldn’t be the responsibility of women and girls alone.
When harassment happens, it can be crippling for the person it’s aimed at, so the people who witness it have an important role to play. The challenge was to help more people, particularly men and boys, recognise everyday sexual harassment, understand the impact it can have, and feel confident enough to do something about it.
Because harassment isn’t always recognised as harassment.
Catcalling, unwanted comments, intimidating behaviour and non-consensual physical contact can be dismissed as normal, harmless, or simply ignored by the people witnessing them. But for the person experiencing it, those seemingly “normal’ moments can fundamentally change how safe they feel.
Telling people that sexual harassment is wrong is important, but showing people how important it is not to ignore those moments and making them impossible to dismiss.
Through animation and storytelling, we brought familiar situations to life from the perspective of the women experiencing them, showing the difference between how a moment might appear to a bystander and how it actually feels to the women involved.
Then we showed what happens next.
Simple bystander interventions gave people practical ways to respond: challenging the behaviour, creating a distraction or supporting the person affected. Small actions that could make a significant difference in the moment.
The campaign ran across out-of-home advertising, paid social and a dedicated Instagram hub, generating almost 550,000 impressions across Trafford.
By making everyday harassment easier to recognise and showing people what they could do when they see it. We helped Greater Manchester turn bystanders from passive witnesses into part of the solution.
Next Work
