NYC NOW - NYC Takes Aim at Catcalling With New Campaign

Episode Date: April 6, 2026

Starting this month, a new campaign from the Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence will appear across subways, ferries, and sidewalks, calling out street harassment and encouraging New Yorkers to step in when they see it happening. Janae speaks with Commissioner Saloni Sethi of NYC's Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence about what the campaign aims to change and how bystanders can safely take action.

From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Jenae Pierre. Have you been a victim of street harassment or cat calling? For most people, it doesn't feel good. But a new city campaign is hoping to stop it by encouraging people to step in when they see or hear it happening. On today's episode, we hear from New Yorkers who have experienced street harassment and a city official shares their plan to combat it.

But first, here's what's happening in a city. our region. The Mamdani administration is issuing New York City's first ever racial equity plan. That's a list of goals for local agencies to combat racial disparities across the city. The mayor talked through some of the details Monday at Megger Everest College. The neighborhoods hit hardest by rent and the rising nature of it, by child care costs and the suffocating manner of it, are the same ones that have been hit for years by institutional neglect and racism. In that way, New York City's affordability crisis and its history of racial inequity are bound together. The plan is required by the city's charter under ballot reforms passed by voters in

2022. A draft of the first plan was due in early 2024 under Mayor Eric Adams. And a version of the plan was completed by the end of his tenure, but it was never released. The NYPD says it will change how it reports hate crimes in the city after several experts spoke to WMYC and questioned that the department's method. Police will now report the number of hate crimes that have been reported to the department, as well as those confirmed by investigators. In March, the NYPD changed its previous policy and began reporting only hate crimes that had been confirmed. WMYC spoke to several experts who said reporting only confirmed hate crimes would be a blow to transparency and could make it appear that hate crimes were dropping in the city when they actually weren't. The 55th annual new

directors New Films Festival returns this week to Lincoln Center and MoMA. This year's festival includes movies from more than 25 countries. Organizers say standouts include Erupsia, which is set in Poland and stars British pop star Charlie XX. MoMA Film Department curator La Francis Wee says another is, Do You Love Me? That's a Lebanese movie constructed entirely from archival footage. You know what is really thrilling about the festival is that no one knows much about these new directors. So we really want the audience to be as bold and adventurous as the filmmakers themselves. Be bold and check out the festival.

It runs through April 19th. City leaders are encouraging New Yorkers to stand up against street harassment and unwanted catcalling. We'll share what that looks like and why it's important after a quick break. Welcome back. Street harassment is something a lot of New Yorkers have to deal with each and every day. It's the comment on the subway platform. Someone following you a little too long,

the moment that makes you cross the street or even change your route home. For a lot of people, it's not one incident. It's routine. We're talking to folks about street harassment. Do you have a moment to chat with us? Do I know the thing you're too about street harassment? Tell me if you do. I went out to Washington Square Park to ask New Yorkers about their experiences with street harassment.

Brooke Feingold, a poet who makes and sells art in the park, said that most of her interactions are nice. But then there are some real weirdos. Which time? What day of the week, honey? Most recent. Most recent. I definitely get a lot of people saying crazy stuff to me because of my hair. They'll be like, oh, I love your blue hair.

And I'm like, thank you. And they're like, I want to fuck you in the ass. And it's like, oh, okay, totally. Ebony T, another seller in the park, told me a man got aggressive with her after she didn't respond good morning back quickly enough. And then no one stepped in the help. A lot of people don't.

do that nowadays. They tend to either turn the eye or act like they didn't see and then when the situation happened, oh, I was there and I saw you, but you didn't do anything. I didn't do anything. You know, you didn't stop. Dan Smith, who was sitting on a park bench, acknowledges that there's a mind between flirting and harassment, but he did have some jokes about it. We're talking to folks about street harassment. Street harassment? I'm an expert. I'm just kidding. You don't have any experience or? As a harassee or harasser, I'm just kidding. Whichever?

Not really, no. Luckily, don't experience it much. Sometimes as a man you wish you would experience it a little bit. Why? Why? Hey, you know, you want to get hit on a little bit. But that's not harassing. A city survey found more than half of people surveyed said they'd been harassed in just the past six months.

Now the city is trying to interrupt that. Starting this month, a new campaign from the mayor's office will show up across subways, fairies, and sidewalks, calling out street harassment and encouraging people to step in when they see it happening. Prince Gregorio, who I also spoke to at the park, says he hasn't had any experience with street harassment or cat calling. But if he did witness it, he says he'd step in. I've watched this show called What Would You Do? And I just told myself that if that happens to me, I would definitely do. something, I would say something to the men. Like, you know, stop doing that or it's not good. I call their attention, I capture their attention, and they veer away from whatever they're

doing. I think that's the best strategy to distract them from doing something that's, you know, you know, go bad. Yeah. And that's exactly what this city campaign is pushing people to do. The city has this new campaign to stop street harassment. They basically want neighbors to be better neighbors. If you see something, say something. So joining me now to the city. talk more about the city's new campaign is Commissioner Soloni Sethi from the New York City's Mayor's Office to end domestic and gender-based violence. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Glad to be here. All right. So at the most basic level, what is this campaign trying to accomplish? Sure. I think at the most basic level, I think, you know, even as you opened, right,

we've sort of normalized street harassment as a fact of daily life in our city. And I think that at its most basic level, the campaign is trying to get New Yorkers to think about that, right? Is that really the choice we want to make? Is that really what we want to accept on our subways and in our streets and in our communities? Or is this something that maybe we want to think about a little bit deeper and think about the choices people are making when they're engaging in street harassment type behavior? So let's talk about what that actually looks like for a bystander, helping to navigate that situation. What are you guys encouraging bystanders to do here? Yeah. So our street harassment prevention advisory board, which we co-chair with the commission on

gender equity, includes city agencies, people with lived experience, and an org called Right to Be, which really focuses pretty exclusively on street harassment and bystander intervention. So we do offer these trainings, these bystander intervention trainings, and I won't remember all the five Ds, but there's five Ds, right? So they're looking at things like distract. Like, can you create a direct distraction and sort of direct somebody elsewhere, right? If you're comfortable, can you de-escalate a situation if that feels safe? So it's things like that.

We're like in a public space. We're trying to give people tools. We're trying to give folks options in terms of what feels safe in that moment. A lot of people are going to think, I'm not going to get involved here. You know, that could go left quickly, you know. How do you account for that? I think people are really focused on the incident and the moment, but there's so many other things you could do before or after, right? So, like, part of this behavior really reflects broader social norms.

And so I think encouraging folks to sort of question those norms at times when it is safe, right? So even when you're talking with a friend, if they say something that seems dismissive, that seems misogynistic, right, we'd encourage folks to question that to be like, how would that make so-and-so feel or how would that make your partner feel? Right. I think that there's these other moments that aren't during an incident that we also want to encourage people to think about intervention, right? It's like if somebody has just experienced something, it can be really meaningful to have the stranger come up to you and say, are you okay? To even acknowledge that something happened that was harmful, right? Do you need help? Do you need to call somebody, right?

I think it doesn't really have to be when it's heated because we understand that there's safety concerns, right? Yeah, yeah. That might not be for everybody. Have you yourself found yourself on either end of a situation like this? I mean, of course. You know, again, as somebody that I didn't grow up in this city, but I grew up in a city, right? I think especially as a young person, it was something that was a fact of life, right? And I think that's something that we think about a lot.

Yeah, so I do think I definitely grew up in a world where it was normalized, right? and kind of, you know, have been fortunate later in life as I raise my own kid. I have a 12-year-old boy. Like, we're talking about it all the time, right? He games, right? So, like, every time he's talking to his gamer friends, I'm like, I'm like, wait, you know, that's not a way you'd talk to somebody. He's like, yeah, I know, I know it's in the game, right?

Or like, you know, he's like, my friend used this word. I'm like, what did you say? You know? What was your response? What did you say when your friend used that word, right? Like, you know, and really thinking about words that are, you know, focused in misogyny in particular, right? And kind of questioning those.

You know, there are people who hear street harassment and they don't take it seriously, right? Like, they see it as talking. Some men may see it as flirting, you know. That's their game. That's sad. But, you know, it's part of New York City, as I mentioned earlier. What's your response to that? I think about this a lot, right?

Sometimes when I'm walking down the street and I'm experiencing this to myself? I'm like, when has this ever worked for you? Right. Like, if this is flirting, like, who has ever said, yes, I'm in, sign me up? Yeah. I've never seen anyone respond back like, oh, yeah, here's my number. Like, it's bad flirting if it's flirting. Terrible.

It's just at a baseline. For sure. Like, try something different. It's not working. But, you know, I grew up in the 80s, right? I was raised with sticks and stones will break my bones, what words will never hurt me, right? And that's just not true, right? It's not.

It's not true. Mom was full of it when she told me that. You know? And so, like, I think we have sort of evolved in a way to think about, like, our words having meanings and language being powerful and, like, language being used to kind of You know, dehumanize folks. That's really what it's about at the end of the day, right? It's about dehumanizing people through language, through use of language. I want to talk a bit more about that survey that you guys did that found that more than half of people surveyed said they'd been harassed in the past six months. And about half said it changed how they moved through the city. What does that tell you about how routine this actually is in the city? Look, I think it's not surprising, but I mean, it's so great that we actually did the survey, right?

Because I think when we can quantify something and point to like where we got the numbers from, it makes that makes the point stronger. You know, for those of us that, you know, walk around in certain bodies in this world, that's not a surprise at all. If you're a single woman, if you're a younger person, right, you're probably avoiding the train at a certain hour. Like, I think that's what they're talking about in terms of how they restrict movement, right? Or thinking about do I go somewhere with a friend or do I take a taxi instead of a train, right? You know, what's great about the survey and this work is this campaign is sort of a direct response to what New Yorkers wanted. And even thinking about, you know, that safety of movement, right? It's like that might inform how we're targeting certain areas, right?

So like transit hubs, for instance, right? We're like, can we do more at placements on transit hubs? Can we do potentially activations around transit hubs? Can we hand out resources, right? And just thinking about those movement pieces, we really hope to keep kind of deepening this work. You know, I think, like I said, that this is sort of step one and something that we hope will be ongoing around this issue. As I mentioned, your ads for this street harassment campaign, it's up on subways, ferries, sidewalks. I, in fact, saw one on the sea train just last night.

But the city has done campaigns like this before. What's different about this one? Like previous campaigns we've done around domestic violence, it's been oftentimes people looking sad. And it's like it's a kind of images that people often look away from, right? Like this looks sad, this looks depressing, I don't want to talk about it, which we have with our issue all the time. I think what's different about this campaign is I think it looks different.

It's more engaging. It's brighter. It's supposed to be a little bit more graphic. And so it's really trying to shift that and be like, how do we make this something that's a little bit more engaging and colorful and bright and kind of grabs you and grabs your attention in a different way. Yeah, it certainly is bright. The neon green, the big mouth. The hey baby, hey baby, hey baby, hey baby on there. Can you describe the other ads?

Sure. So one of them is, as you said, the hey baby, hey baby, hey baby. And then the other one is a, hey, sexy. And they repeat the phrase over and over again as like very common cat call phrases that folks here. And then they kind of describe the behaviors that constitute street harassment, right? So I think the one that folks always think about, most obvious one is verbal. Obviously, you know, saying something verbally to folks is street harassment. But also it can be physical gestures, right?

We also include a camera because photographs, unwanted photographs also, you know, counts as street harassment. And we see a lot of that. And then it has sort of like the word bubble that says that it's not just harmless behavior, that it is street harassment and it has impact on folks. And then there's a QR code connecting to resources. How are you going to measure if this is working, not just that people saw it, but, you know, that the behavior actually changed? I know you mentioned the QR code. But when we talk about those behaviors changing, what does that actually look like? Yeah.

I mean, I think I think two things, right? I think obviously that that's what makes the prevention work hard as its long-term behavior change. And what's really complicated with our work, too, right? It's like most of the violence that people experience, whether it's street harassment, whether it's intimate partner violence or sexual violence, is underreported. So in some ways, we might actually want to see an increase in reporting and people reaching out, even though that sounds counterintuitive. And so for us, that that includes calling our 24-hour hope hotline, right, which is a 1-800-6-1-8-1-8-6-7-3,

which anyone can call. if you've been a victim of crime, abuse, and including gender violence to connect to somebody right away and talk to somebody. We would like to see people coming to our family justice centers. We have one in each borough that are walk-in centers. And we also have like an online directory of services, which is a NYC Hope. We want to see people engaging with that, whether it's, you know, reporting to law enforcement, which I think is always an option. We also want to see engagement in all these other ways of people really understanding that there's resources out there and that this is a problem that, you know, we can help support. Yeah.

So here in New York City, people interact with a lot of different communities that they're not a part of, right? And some conversations might be misunderstood as a result, like when cultural norms are different between groups. Is there any concern that campaigns like this might reinforce stereotypes? Is that something that you tried to think through and develop in it? Yeah, I mean, we definitely hope that they don't, like, reinforce any stereotypes, right? And we don't want to, in our work with this campaign, with our broader work on gender-based violence, we really are very careful to sort of not blame culture and cultural norms, right? But again, really look at this work from the perspective of the victim or survivor, right?

Because whatever cultural norms are, they might be okay for everybody. But if that norm is harming one person, I really would like folks to think about that norm a little differently, right? Like you can still have the norm, but if you are somebody within a culture that has certain norms around catcalling, It could be around education. Like, let's take something like very neutral, right? Like, you know, like there's cultures that have norms around education and who gets educated and who doesn't get educated. I don't want to necessarily challenge that norm as a whole by this, but I want people

to start thinking about what about the one person who wants to get educated, but the culture is saying no. How do we help that one person, right? And will that get us to rethink that norm a little bit? Yeah. Commissioner Saloni Sethi is from the New York City Mayor's Office to end domestic and gender-based violence. Thanks so much for stopping by.

Thank you so much for having me. Decades ago, Alan Porter met Jabbar Collins at the Green Haven Correctional Facility, where they'd become best of friends. They both claim to be innocent of their charges. While locked up, Jabbar educated himself just as a first year law student would, spending hundreds of hours in the prison's law library. I had been railroaded so thoroughly during my trial, and I said I would never trust anyone else to be my savior. I would have to do it myself. His conviction was overturned in 2010, and he promised his buddy Alan he'd get him out too. Everyone I spoke to who were from the same area, they came in and they said the same thing.

You know, Allen didn't commit this crime. So this was like an open secret with everyone who came from that neighborhood. And I knew that he was wrongfully convicted, and I knew that there was no way that I can leave him there. Next time on NYC Now, we talk with the two men about their journeys to freedom. You don't want to miss the conversation. Look out for the drop this winter. on NYC Now. Thanks for listening. I'm Jenae Pierre. See you next time.