Very large numbers of women report street harassment, ranging from looks and wolf whistles, to aggressive, sexually-focused assault.
In 2013, a Vancouver student, Pomona Lake, produced an image highlighting victim-blaming around skirt length. Her image was subsequently plagiarised by a German women’s group.
This mini-project was inspired by Lake’s idea, but the message is targeted differently, written using behavioural insights concepts, and emerged from an informal ‘focus group’ which I arranged. The original idea was to display one image at a time in the same place, replacing it with the next after a week or so, however they could simply be on a scrolling display as I have used here. There are many ways of assessing the potential impact, particularly through street surveys of attitudes to harassment, close to the display both before and after its appearance.
