“I’ve been experiencing harassment since I was 14, and it hasn’t stopped yet,” says Shawna Potter, local musician-turned-activist. Last month, Potter celebrated the launch of Hollaback! Bmore (bmore.ihollaback.org), the local chapter of Hollaback!, the international grassroots organization to end gender-based street harassment. Potter coordinated Hollaback! Bmore with the help of a few supportive friends, celebrating with a launch party Feb. 12 at the Metro Gallery featuring Me and This Army, Thrushes, War on Women, and comic Lucé Tomlin-Brenner. “I get harassed just walking down the street,” she says, “whether it’s winter or not, no matter what I’m wearing, what the weather’s like.”

Women and LGBTQ folks know what she’s talking about all too well, and pedestrians, bike commuters, and public transportation riders see it every day. A woman minding her own business at the bus stop who has to deal with the guy who pulled up in a car who thinks he’s flirting but is really just being a dick. The woman crossing the street who tells the man to get back in his truck when he gets out to tell her how good he thinks she looks and starts following her. The kissing and um-umm noises and “say girl” remarks that guys make when a trio of woman head toward the entrance to a club. These are the sort of omnipresent comments that this writer has witnessed in Baltimore when waiting for the bus, smoking a cigarette, or walking across the street—moments when the form and content of an interaction between a man and woman look and feel inappropriate and unacceptable.

Hollaback! exists to raise awareness of this behavior and figure out how to address it. “It’s definitely a form of gender-based violence,” Potter says. “Most women I know, the way we dress is affected, where we go at what time of day is affected by the feeling of, ‘Uh, I just don’t feel like being harassed right now.’ We want a world where we can say, ‘Good morning’ innocently and not put on our tough girl faces and try to ignore it—because that’s not a good feeling, either. As soon as, ‘Hey baby’ is said, I mean, you just ruined my day.”

Hollaback Bmore just launched in January, following the Hollaback! New York model that started in 2005. The site originated as a way for women to post stories about their harassment and create a supportive network of women who felt the same way about it; the organization launched its Hollaback! app for iPhone and Android in November, enabling the harassed to take a photo of their harasser and post it to the hollaback.org community, with the location geo-tracked.

These are the early steps in researching an under-researched problem, at a time when this sort of discussion is fortuitous. As the recent Congressional discussions to limit federally funded abortions show, the language used in the discussion of gender-based violence matters. And with something as omnipresent and often passively tolerated as street harassment, giving a woman the opportunity to say she was harassed, show where it took place, and even post a photo of the man who did it brings the problem to light in a bluntly direct manner.

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