In partnership with
G.A.R.Ç.E.S*
When women of Mediterranean seize new media for their
rights!”!
Press
release- 25 mars 2014
How did Mediterranean
women take hold of social networks (blogs, videos, Facebook) to defend their
rights?
What are the most
innovative campaigns in Egypt, Tunisia, France...? What is the impact on their
society?
The Mediterranean
Women’s Fund organises a meeting with active women of these campaign. Such
campaigns include creativity, diversity, interdisciplinary arts (video,
graphics, photos, music, etc.).
Saturday, March 29,
2014 from 9:30 to 1:30 p.m. at Sciences Po Paris.
Room Albert Sorel, 27 rue
Saint- Guillaume, 75007 Paris.
Metro: Rue du Bac and
Saint Germain des Près.
The Mediterranean
Women’s Fund will host
The Egyptian
Association HarassMap Communication Officer, Eba'a El Tammami.
HarassMap fights
against sexual harassment in the street, via a mobile application.
Founded by four
girls, HarassMap has established online
mapping and mobile application that allows victims to alert the association via
SMS and receive instant support and advice. And it works! This concept is spreading
from India to Brazil.
Farah Barqawi of
Women's’ Uprising in the Arab World "the uprising of women in the Arab
world " is a Facebook page created after the Arab revolutions which brings
together more than a hundred thousand people. From this sentence, " I am
for the uprising of women in the Arab world because ... ", this campaign
calls on women to post pictures of themselves holding a sign where their
demands are written.
Natacha Henry,
co-director of animation films for the French association Libre Terre des
femmes.10 animated shorts movies available online in 9 languages to inform
women of their rights against domestic violence.
Note: All interventions
will be in English (no simultaneous translation).
* About the organizers
The FFMed is a fund
that supports women for their emancipation, from north to south across the
Mediterranean in 21 countries. Currently, the FFmed supports and monitors 100
programs whose priority is to strengthen and to enhance the ability of
young women to fight for equal rights, to support innovative
projects in this effort, and to help young women's associations to develop.
G.A.R.Ç.ES (Groupe d’Action et de Réflexion
Contre l’Environnement Sexiste) is a feminist collective created at Sciences Po
Paris as a result of the mobilization against the retirement’s pension reform
in 2010 and, more specifically, after finding that the distribution of speaking
time between students in General Assembly is uneven.
G.A.R.Ç.ES suggests bringing
together all the people who believe in these values and in this feminist
project of social change.
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
HarassMap
Background:
Sexual
harassment and assault in Egypt has reached epidemic proportions. According to
HarassMap’s 2014 study, 97 per cent of women participating in the study have
experienced sexual harassment. A UN WOMEN study from 2013 puts the number at
99,3 per cent.
HarassMap, a volunteer-based initiative, was
launched in December 2010 by four co-founders, volunteers, and tech partners in
response to the sexual harassment that society had become increasingly tolerant
towards and no one else was willing to address at the level of the community.
Objective:
HarassMap’s mission is to end the social acceptability
of sexual harassment and assault in Egypt.
Main activities:
We use an integrated approach that combines an online and mobile reporting
system research,
communications campaigns,
and a huge on-the-ground community
mobilization effort across Egypt where our volunteers support
bystanders to enforce a zero-tolerance policy against sexual harassment/assault
in their areas - shops, cafés and vehicles, or university faculties, as part of
our Safe Schools and Universities program.
We are also currently working on a pilot of a larger
project to expand our community mobilization
activities and transform public space in Egypt by creating physical spaces in
communities that are committed to enforcing a sexual harassment zero-tolerance
policy. Our partners will be shown as role models in a big campaign to generate
a movement that motivates all of society to get active against sexual
harassment in a tangible, practical way.
Methodology:
Our work is based on the idea that a critical mass of
people who change their behaviour can bring about larger normative behaviour
change in the whole society. We therefore work to achieve our mission to create
a critical mass of people by convincing bystanders to stand up to sexual
harassment or assault before or when they see it happen. This way, by taking a
collective stand against sexual harassment and assault, we as a society can
create social and legal consequences that discourage harassing behaviour and
seriously reduce it.
Partners:
Our technical partners, who help us with our reporting
system and online map, include Ushahidi and Megakheir. We also partner with
other initiatives working on the issue of sexual harassment (Anti Harassment
Movement, Nazra for Feminist Studies, El Nadeem Center, Mashrou3 EL Mareekh,
and many others) to create joint campaigns, workshops, and community
activities.
Achieved results:
·
We have 40 community captains who
mobilize about 1500 volunteers in 18 governorates to go into their own
communities’’ streets to convince bystanders to stand up to sexual harassment.
These captains have also begun to expand their activities into the smaller
villages in their governorates.
·
Professors at Cairo University are
adopting our anti- sexual harassment policy for implementation at the
university and will lobby for its adoption at all universities in Egypt.
·
Anecdote
from our community work : In 2012 our community mobilization volunteers
recruited a street kiosk as our first pilot Safe Area partner. The area around
the kiosk is one of this neighbourhood’s sexual harassment hot spots, where
large groups of male youth spend their free time in the street and holler at
every woman who passes by. The kiosk owner is passionate about the cause and
readily agreed to work with us and to prevent, stop and report harassment
whenever he witnesses it. In early 2013 a HarassMap volunteer passed by this
street while she was filming footage for a video on this topic. She got
harassed and physically attacked by a group of young men who insulted and tried
to kick her. With the help of the kiosk’s owner she managed to take one of the
men with her to a police station (the harasser’s presence being a precondition
for filing a report) where the case was eventually settled with an apology and
the harasser’s pledge to not only never harass again but to convince his peers
to follow his example. HarassMap widely publicised this incident and its
successful escalation and soon after a police car was deployed to this area on
weekend nights. Even more importantly people living in this neighbourhood
organized themselves informally and started patrolling this area’s streets to
make them safer for everyone. In April 2013 a young woman passed by this street
and got verbally harassed by an older man who also followed her. This caught
the attention of the caretaker of a fast food chain restaurant located close to
our Safe Area kiosk. The caretaker called the police who came by car and took
the man into custody. The kiosk’s manager reported this story to us and the
caretaker, asked why he had intervened, replied reflecting HarassMap’s
philosophy: ‘Because this is a Safe Area, sexual harassment is not accepted
here!’
·
Research results and experiences from our work
on the ground are showing positive perception change: People have started to
understand sexual harassment as also verbal, not only physical harassment, and
more and more people (contrary to before) believe that sexual harassment is not
related to women’s clothes.
·
Discovering the truth
about sexual harassment: When we started collecting reports, we discovered from
the data that all of the myths and stereotypes about the issue were being proven
wrong, even stereotypes we ourselves had. Some of the things that HarassMap
data (more than 1500 crowdsourced reports of sexual harassment) is the first to
document include:
o
There is no link to
socio-economic background or marital status - harassers are young and old, big
business owners and street vendors, married and unmarried. Delayed marriage,
one of the most common reasons given for sexual harassment, isn’t really
the problem. Poverty or lack of education isn’t either.
o
Many harassers are
children and have not reached the age of puberty so sexual frustration, another
common reason or excuse for sexual harassment, isn’t the problem either.
o
The age or dress or
actions of the harassed matter and our reports and research show that some
women experience getting harassed more after dressing more conservatively.
o
Sexual harassment
happens at all times of day, even 7 or 8 am is not uncommon, and it can be
verbal or physical, and includes gesturing, following, indecent exposure etc.
o
Sexual harassment happens
everywhere. We have reports of sexual harassment from rural and urban areas all
over Egypt so urbanization and overcrowding is not the reason.
o
Also men and boys are
being sexually harassed.
(These,
and other research findings, can be found in our newly published report Towards a Safer City – Sexual harassment in
Greater Cairo: The effectiveness of crowdsourced data that can be found on
our website.)
·
Our ‘Debunking
Myths’ campaign has over the past year become one of the
most well known anti-sexual harassment ‘slogans’ and the messages and content
of the campaign are being used, shared, and even re-published by leading TV
channels, other social initiatives, and popular YouTube personalities.
·
Our ‘Mesh Sakta’
campaign gathered hundreds of stories from women who have started to stand up
to sexual harassment that happened to them or to others, the campaign material
(consisting of tips for how you can stand up to sexual harassment) can be found
all over Cairo neighbourhoods. The campaign hashtag was trending in Egypt
during the peak of the campaign, and is still one of the main hashtags being
used in discussions on sexual harassment/assault in Egypt.
·
Since our launch we have supported at least 28
other HarassMap-inspired initiatives to launch outside of Egypt.
Sustainability
We
train our community captains with TOT trainings with the goal of cultivating
independent local leadership. We also provide all of our information, lessons
learned, campaigns, and research as open source for others to utilize.
Strength:
·
Our team is made up of some of the
people with the longest experience working on this issue in Egypt.
·
Our methods and activities are
based on our experience in the field and targeted to meet specific needs in the
relevant context. We have a coherent theory of change that all our activities
are grounded in. We focus strongly on testing our methods and evaluating their
impact, altering them in response to feedback and lessons learned.
Challenges:
·
Timely and professional expertize to deal with
technical issues arising with our map/reporting system is sometimes difficult to
find in Egypt and this sometimes slows down our work and limits our capacity to
expand and develop this part of our activities.
·
The political instability has also sometimes
created security concerns and a certain sense of unpredictability to our
activities on the ground all around Egypt and we sometimes have had to cancel
or reorganize planned activities.
It should be mentioned that on June 4(2014), a new law was approved, criminalizing sexual harassment for the first time in modern Egyptian history. The new law is the result of persistent efforts of women’s organisations and working groups. Although not all of the advice coming from the organisations has been taken into account, sexual harassment is finally considered a crime in Egypt and perpetrators might now face penalties, such as long jail terms and high fines.
Condensed from an
article published in June 6, 2014 in “The Guardian”
Egypt's outgoing
president, Adly Mansour, issued a decree that categorised sexual harassment as
a crime punishable by a minimum six-month jail term and a fine worth 3,000
Egyptian pounds – with increased penalties for employers and repeat offenders.
Sexual harassers have
been prosecuted on rare occasions in the
past in Egypt – but only on vaguer charges of physical assault, and even then
the defendants have often been found innocent.
UN research from
2013 suggested that 99.3% of Egyptian women has experienced sexual harassment–
but it is often the victims who are blamed for their experience, rather than
the harassers.
Campaigners
welcomed the law, but warned that it remained to be seen whether it would be
enforced by police.
"The biggest
issue is still the cultural one: society doesn't see it as a crime," said
Eba'a El-Tamimi, a spokesperson for HarassMap, a group that works to end harassment in Egypt.
"And police often tend to sympathise with harassers or be harassers
themselves. Even when someone manages to get to the police station to report
harassment, she will still encounter resistance from police officers, who will
try to deter her from going through with filing the police report."
More information:
For general enquiries: info@harassmap.org
For media enquiries: media@harassmap.org
________________________________________________
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“ #painauchocolat ”: A media campaign against islamophobia
In October
2012, the Collective against islamophobia (CCIF) launched a national media
campaign against islamophobia. With no prior experience in using social media,
Marwan Muhammad, spokesperson for the CCIF, explained how they have learned how
to use them, in order to raise awareness and create dialog.
Analyzing the tool to make the best use of it
In France,
there are basically two main social media: Facebook and Twitter.
Audience on
Facebook looks like a web addict population, young, familiar with technology
and sharing a lot of info on their private life but also thoughts, articles or
videos. The public is large and diverse.
On Twitter,
despite the limited number of users, there is an overrepresentation of people
with influence: politicians, journalists, activists… The limited number of
characters (140) forces one to have simple messages. You can directly measure
the social impact of these messages by looking at the number of “retweets”. When
running political or human rights campaigns, one must keep in mind that sharing
personal information on facebook or twitter is not often relevant…
The
analysis included looking at what already existed and how other groups were
using the tool. For example, “Humour de
droite” (Right Wing humor) or “Brave
patrie” (Brave homeland) use jokes and play with clichés on French
tradition or politics…
There is no need to have a lot of followers to
have an impact.
The CCIF
had 1500 followers when they started the campaign (the number doubled in the
next 3 months) but the vast majority of them are activists, journalists,
artists and politicians, which maximizes the impact.
Using media tools to offset budget limitations
and escape cognitive bias
For an organization
with no governmental support, using media tools is a way to maximize your
impact.
1. Who are you talking to?
2. What are you trying to achieve?
With these
two questions in mind, CCIF organized an information event (described below).
Early
October 2012, a French elected official, Jean-François Copé, said, wrote and
twitted that there were neighborhoods and schools “where children could not eat
their chocolate roll (pain au chocolat)
during Ramadan”, implying that White French children were brutalized or harassed
by bad French Muslim children. Following this stigmatizing and islamophobic
statement, the CCIF created a hashtag #painauchocolat and organized a free
distribution of chocolate rolls in front of a busy train station on a weekday.
The aim was not to give away free food for the sake of it, but to have
conversations with people, to create dialog and to underline with humor the
xenophobia and nonsense of this statement. The
fun and the irony of the event attracted media and political attention too,
and instead of paying very high prices for commercials, journalists wrote pieces in their papers and blogs about the action and recommended it.
We are
engaged in a deep reflection about cognitive bias and how to escape traditional
prejudices. Most people have emotional reactions about other minorities that
are either reinforced or at odds with the media images and representations.
Then, what is the red line in media treatment? A headscarf? A beard? Everything
is radicalized and presented in asymmetric ways. CCIF tries to escape the boxes and change this paradigm.
The campaign on the chocolate roll, for example, aimed at addressing the
prejudice Copé’s statement implies, with humor. If the CCIF had said “stop
stigmatizing Muslims”, it would have failed. Relying on the “cool factor” can
increase the impact.
Making of in video (French) : http://vimeo.com/51270846
Some conclusions and tips
Generally,
you need to be transparent and keep in mind that you’re talking to people with
feelings and opinions that you’re trying to grasp. You need to keep smiling and
having good time, and not to react emotionally to any provocation. Thanks to
the transparency of your actions and public meetings, you can avoid political
hijacking, distortion or misappropriation.
If you’re
trying to catch the mainstream people’s attention, you need to remember that
the majority of them has followed the same courses, attended the same schools
and thus have the same mindset (thesis/antithesis/synthesis).
On twitter,
you choose to play a role and use it to be heard. For example, as a
statistician you can use this skill to originally comment on the news and
analyzing current issues. It helps make your profile different from another.
You need to
take the time to build your network, be open-minded and engage with journalists
by doing fact-checking for example (in the article X, line Y, something wrong
is mentioned…). It sends the signal to the media community that they are made
accountable and responsible for what they say and write.
General instructions
and tips for Twitter:
-
It’s always better to be humoristic, pedagogical and objective
than emotional, angry or aggressive J
-
Twitter
is a way to build your legitimacy and/or to influence public debate
-
Look
at popular hashtags and find one that works: the more mainstream the more it
works
-
Prepare
20-30 funny sentences with the hashtag and coordinate with friends to launch
the twitter campaign at the same time
The "Pain au chocolat" campaign was part of a bigger campaign called "Nous, aussi, sommes la nation" (We, too, are the nation) that relied on visuals, images and photographies asserting that French Muslims already belong to the Nation and do not need to "integrate".
________________________________________________
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« Stop le contrôle au faciès »,
a national campaign using media and community organizing to fight police profiling
The Collective Against Profiling(Collectif contre le contrôle au faciès) came into being in spring 2011 to take
up the issue of police profiling. It is a consortium of grassroots organizations from France, especially urban areas. A study ordered by the Open Society Justice Initiative, « Police et Minorités Visibles: les contrôles d’identité à Paris » by Fabien Jobard (CESDIP) and René Levy (CNRS), showed that :
- people
dressed in urban youth attire were, on average, 11 times more likely to be
stopped and asked for their ID in Paris than those in formal clothing,
- that
Blacks and Arabs were 6 and 8 times more likely to be stopped than Whites,
-
and
that « Jeunes des quartiers », youth from urban underprivileged
backgrounds, most of whom also have an immigrant history, are thus the group
most targeted for identity checks.
Stop and search using profiling
on the basis of appearance is both illegal and inefficient while the consequences
on their subjects’ lives are considerable. This
campaign has mostly argued that the lack of data or any trace of identity
checks in France prevents authorities from measuring their impact or
efficacy/effectiveness while perpetuating tension and stereotyping between the
population and the police whose legitimacy has come under question in many
urban neighborhoods.
The
campaign relies on five levels of action: grassroots, legal, media, political, and
legislative.
In
the summer of 2011, the Collective publicized a phone number where profiling victims could send an SMS to be called
back within 24 hours and to request legal information, legal aid, or to take
legal action against the state. The number was handed out in the street by local and community leaders, in their own neighborhood or neighborhoods with a high-risk of stop-and-frisk. You can watch an action here.
The number was shared on the streets in
three urban areas in France (Paris, Lyon and Lille), and went national with the release of the Collectiveʼs series « Mon 1er contrôle dʼidentité » (“my 1st identity check”), short vignettes of France’s most famous rappers talking about their experiences of
profiling and promoting the Collectiveʼs
number as a new, easy and constructive way out of submission to illegal and
abusive procedures. The popularity and fame of the
portrayed rappers ensured a wide audience among the youth most targeted by the
profiling and helped promoting the phone number. They also helped to build
trust as the youth often feel powerless in front of the police.
The episodes were released twice a week on
Facebook and on the website for several months, and viewed over 2 million times on the
web. The trailer made national news and forced the issue onto the public agenda
a couple of months before the official launch of the 2012 presidential
campaign, allowing Collective members to join forces with grassroots partners
such as AC LEFEU and Nous Ne Marcherons Plus to lobby
political parties and get three major presidential candidates (the far left,
the Green Party and the Socialist Party) to commit to fighting profiling.
An interactive photography project
was also conducted to disseminate the action on Facebook and through the
website:
people were pictured holding a slate with their names, the number of stop and search they
experienced, their age and city.
This interactive photography project was repeated a few months later with a prototype of "ID check receipt", which the consortium has been advocating for. These events allow people to participate in a fun way, to promote your action and attract media's attention.
A few months after the release of the phone number, the Collective had 1000 Facebook members, 20 articles in different media and dozens of text messages. The collective worked regularly with the press and media, sending them press releases and organizing press conferences.
A few months after the release of the phone number, the Collective had 1000 Facebook members, 20 articles in different media and dozens of text messages. The collective worked regularly with the press and media, sending them press releases and organizing press conferences.
In
April 2012, 14 plaintiffs who had sent an SMS to the Collective decided to
press charges against the State with the support of the Open Society Justice
Initiative and the Syndicat des Avocats de France. Their simultaneous lawsuits represented the first class action in French
history against the state for discrimination. Since the inauguration of
President François Hollande in May 2012, the Collective has continued to
collect cases of police abuse and provide legal counsel. It is pursuing
discussions with police unions, the Ministry of the Interior, the High Authority
Against Discrimination, the CNIL and several senators to address myths surrounding
a policy which has occasionally been portrayed as “anti-police” and lax with crime,
raising concerns about its impact on the morale of police officers, already facing
discontent and high levels of depression and suicide.
If the consortium, through its mediatic action, forces first rank political figures and decision makers to give their opinion, the idea of an "ID check receipt", was burried by the French minister of interior Manuel Valls. This is why, on October 15th 2012, a big
press conference with major journalists launched the 2nd season of
the video campaign
that a trailer had already been announcing for a couple of weeks. The people
portrayed in those videos were not only rappers but were writers,
entrepreneurs, artists, elected officials, journalists, sportsmen and actors, underlying that profiling
was targeting minorities across social lines.
All
along the campaign, the spokesperson and
leaders of the collective participated in media training to interact with
the press, which helped them be prepared for questions or for debates, even on
national television.
The Collective against profiling momentarily shifted its focus on the legal aspects of their struggle by providing support to victims of abuse and teach people how to defend themselves. Along legal education and empowerment, the
Collective is currently developing a new campaign pushing for a global police
reform which takes into account both police officersʼ needs and the concerns of citizens and relies on
transparency, accountability, and safety for all.
