It’s been one year since DC’s historic roundtable on street harassment where more than 40 diverse community members spoke out at the Wilson Building about their experiences with harassment in public spaces — on the street, in bars, on public transit, and in local shelters.

We’ve had an impactful year of growth in our programming with the re-launch of Safe Bars, which has trained staff at 20 local bars in bystander intervention strategies, and a new phase of our awareness campaign on public transit with Metro and bus ads that feature our city’s most marginalized identities and encourage bystanders to speak out against harassment.

But what’s happening on a citywide level?

This fall, CASS convened the End Street Harassment Coalition, a group of about 20 local organizations working to pass the 2016 Street Harassment Prevention Task Force Bill, introduced by CM Nadeau. The bill will establish a task force to collect data on street harassment and make recommendations to curb this most pervasive form of violence. While the original iteration of the bill defined street harassment as unwanted comments, gestures, or actions targeting someone because of their real or perceived gender, gender expression, or sexual orientation, this year’s local high-profile incidents of harassment at Shaw Library and Banneker Pool, and especially this fall’s spike in incidents of harassment on the basis of real or perceived racial, ethnic, and/or religious identity has demonstrated that we must broaden the definition of street harassment, collect appropriate data to assess the ways that different communities experience the problem, and recommend holistic solutions to prevent harassment from escalating to more severe violence.

The End Street Harassment Coalition will work to form DC’s task force on street harassment in 2017, and we’ll need your help.

Stay tuned for a letter to sign on in support of the bill. For now, tell your Council members that, with racist, sexist, Islamophobic, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic harassment on the rise, stopping harassment needs to be a top priority for DC in 2017!