Pushing (And Chalking) Back At Catcalling
Meet Sophie Sandberg, the woman behind a global movement against street harassment @ChalkBack
Photo: Nathalia Alcantara
Photo: Nathalia Alcantara
Sophie Sandberg was only 15, but on that sunny morning in 2012 she relished the idea of becoming an adult. As she dressed up in her bedroom in the Upper West Side, the then shy teenager anticipated meeting her boss and coworkers on the first day of her job in a downtown New York bakery. Wanting to make a good impression, she picked her outfit carefully: a purple sundress and white espadrilles sandals, the perfect combination to take on the steamy summer streets. She checked her purse. Wallet, check. Phone, check. Keys, check. Great, she was on time.
As she got out of the subway in Union Square, a deep voice pierced her ear:
“Hey, sexy”
She continued walking. After all, the day was good. She felt like a grown-up. She was on time.
“Nice legs,” a stranger said a block later.
With every block, a new comment, and with every “Hi, beautiful,” a new question: Maybe there was something wrong with what she was wearing? Maybe it was the way she was walking? How was she supposed to respond? The questions frazzled her for the rest of the day and distracted her from what had otherwise been a great start at her summer job.
Later that night, she told her parents about the comments. “Ignore it and keep walking,” they said. Street harassment, she learned, was accepted as a part of life by most people around her. But it did not seem acceptable to her, and she would not rest until she found the right way to respond to these lewd comments.
It took four years for her to find a way to push back at street harassers, but eventually she ignited a wave of activists in six continents, 49 countries and 150 cities who joined her. Chalk Back, her nonprofit organization, uses street chalking to raise awareness about catcalling and has to date chalked the harassers’ own words on sidewalks in over 800 sidewalks in New York and many more abroad.
Also referred to as stranger harassment, catcalling is defined by psychologists as a “form of sexual harassment, or unwanted verbal or nonverbal sexual attention.” It is a one-sided interaction that can be accompanied by “whistles, winks, or grabs,” according to a paper published in the journal Current Psychology in 2019. Like all forms of sexual harassment, it can impact people’s quality of life, body image and self-esteem, experts say.
That summer when she was 15, Sandberg avoided certain streets, night walks and revealing outfits. Catcalling, she said recently, harms people by restricting their access to public spaces due to intimidation. @CatcallsOfNYC aims to give victims a way to reclaim the public spaces where they have been harassed.
The project started with a writing class assignment in 2016, when Sandberg was a freshman at New York University, majoring in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Asked to immerse herself in an issue and document it on social media, she had the subject at the tip of her tongue. At that point, the 19-year-old was fed up and had already been writing about catcalling in school.
With no plan other than to get a good grade, Sandberg went to a hardware store near Washington Square and bought chalk, the only material she needed to execute her idea. The plan was simple: She would go to the spots where the catcalling happened and chalk back the words on the sidewalk for other people to confront it.
The first chalk was a short one: “Hey beautiful,” the words a man said to her while following her late at night on 10th Street and Second Avenue. She enjoyed how passersby sometimes slowed their walking pace with their eyes directed at the quote, and fought her shyness when people talked to her. The daughter of two therapists, Sandberg often tried to listen and engage when polite strangers approached her with questions about the chalking.
One day, she spent several minutes explaining the project to a man, who then asked her out on a date. “I think he just pretended to be interested in the project,” she said, laughing. More recently, a man persistently asked for her phone number while she was working on a quote. “It’s ironic,” she said. Until now, not realizing what the project is about, men often catcall Sandberg and other activists from @CatcallsOfNYC while they chalk.
For the first two years, the project’s Instagram page had no more than 100 followers. They were mostly Sandberg’s friends, who would share their experiences with street harassment; she would go to the spots where it happened and write the words down. It wasn't until the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, in 2018, that more people started paying attention. Articles featuring Catcalls of NYC at BuzzFeed and Mic News were the first to attract an audience. Today, the page has roughly 175,000 followers.
The media attention attracted women from different parts of the world who reached out asking to bring Catcalls of NYC to their cities. Faraj from London was the first. After that, everything happened so fast that Sandberg can’t remember what city came next. In 2018, she founded “Chalk Back,” an umbrella organization to manage the dozens of local branches of “Catcalls of'' around the world: Catcalls of Frankfurt, Catcalls of Cairo, Catcalls of Paris, Catcalls of Bogota, among others.
Catcalling occurs around the globe. In 2016, ActionAid, an international organization against poverty and injustice, conducted a survey revealing that 79% of women living in cities in India, 86% in Thailand, and 89% in Brazil have been subjected to harassment or violence in public. While Sandberg is amazed by the traction her movement received, she is not surprised the message resonated with women around the world.
Today, one of the most challenging aspects of her work with @ChalkBack is multitasking: “I feel like on a given day, I'm kind of doing five things,” she said. “I'm learning about how to write grants, and maybe editing videos for our page. And figuring out our leadership structure for the global movement. I'm planning local events in New York. And I'm working on social media and giving advice to different call accounts about how to run their pages.”
Sophie Sandberg during a 2021 @CatcallsOfNYC demonstration with @TheRealCatwalk, a grassroots organization that promotes body acceptance. Photo: Nathalia Alcantara
For an income, Sandberg does freelance speaking and educational workshops to students and youth groups, freelance writing, and occasionally, she does cat- and baby-sitting. Although she has got small grants and has done some crowdfunding for chalk back, she receives no salary from the organization. This January, near its five-year anniversary, Catcalls of NYC attained a legal nonprofit status thanks to volunteer lawyers.
One of Sandberg’s next goals for @CatcallsOfNYC is to start working on quotes on long-lasting murals. Street art, she said, has the power to provoke new thinking and start conversations that ignite social change. To Sandberg, the solution to catcalling relies heavily on bystanders intervening by speaking back on behalf of victims. That is the premise of Catcalls of NYC: the more awareness, the more people respectfully intervene.
To learn more about Sophie Sandberg and get involved, go to:
Instagram: @CatcallsofNYC and @ChalkBackOrg
