Getting to the root of sexual harassment

Girls and women face harassment from boys and men every day. Southwark Council is tackling the issue with their award-winning campaign, Through Her Eyes. Ella Rogers, Senior Media Officer, explains more. 

Making Southwark’s streets safer for women and girls is a top priority for the council. This resulted in us committing to launch a major campaign to tackle misogyny in the borough. National crime data and our survey on women’s safety showed that the majority of women and girls in Southwark and across the UK have been sexually harassed in public.
Seemingly small acts – cat-calling, leering, unwanted touching – are not isolated incidents. They are fuelled and excused by the same sexist beliefs that underpin full-blown male violence against women and girls. But it’s not for women and girls to adapt their behaviour to avoid unwanted attention or keep themselves safe. That’s why Through Her Eyes is targeted at men and boys.

Our campaign is ongoing, centred on an impactful video that shows men and boys sexual harassment through a girl’s eyes. Our aim is to encourage them to challenge their own attitudes and behaviour, and that of others. This helped formed our brief that was won by agency Nice and Serious. From concept to conclusion, every component was tested with our target audience. We ran focus groups throughout the process where they steered the campaign – both the creative direction and content. 

In the video and poster artwork, the gender roles are swapped. The narrative follows a teenage boy who navigates sexual harassment from women and girls on his way to school. The actors and settings were chosen to reflect Southwark and its diversity. 

Behaviour change can take decades. Even something as simple as drinking an extra cup of water a day can take more than two months to become a consistent habit. Misogyny has been handed down generation after generation. So the change we need won’t happen overnight.

We had to ensure our campaign would have long-term impact, which we did in three ways:

1. Achieving initial impact: We targeted a niche group of men and boys in Southwark aged between 16 and 25 as a key moment in adolescence for behaviour change. We harnessed the unique reach of this group across social media channels with paid-for advertising, launching on White Ribbon Day (the international day for ending male violence against women). Having engaging content that was topical meant the video snowballed organically online, with coverage secured across national, regional, local and broadcast media. It has now been watched over 520,000 times. 
2. Growing our initial impact: We capitalize on every opportunity to continue driving the campaign forward. We worked with local cinema, Peckhamplex, to show the video to captive audiences as the last advert before every film during the 16 days of activism following White Ribbon Day. During the same time, we promoted the campaign to commuters at one of London’s busiest stations at London Bridge. Over 3.2 million people passed through the station while our campaign was on their screens.
3. Embedding the campaign: We are embedding the campaign within different networks. The video and dedicated resource pack has been rolled out to all secondary schools to integrate into PSHE education. Southwark Young Advisors use the video in their anti-misogyny workshops for primary and secondary pupils, as do charity Bede House who we commission to deliver workshops on healthy relationship in schools. Other councils are using the video in their women’s safety work and the Metropolitan Police incorporated the video as a resource for their safer school officers who work with over 1,000 schools across London. 

Feedback from our target audience
“Before, this was all normalised. But it’s definitely something that’s going to be in my mind since watching the video because it shouldn’t be normal.”

“We might not have done [sexual harassment] ourselves but we’ve definitely all had the chance to stop people doing it and haven’t.”
 

The conversations the video has inspired shows the seed has been planted for more conversations to grow, for attitudes to evolve, and for behaviour change to set in. Our key message for the campaign was simple: see it, stop it. But for our campaign, it doesn’t stop here.

Get in touch if you have any questions by emailing [email protected]
 

Watch and share Southwark Council’s film here.