HarassMap — Crowdsourced Harassment Mapping & Safe-Area Bystander Network

HarassMap was founded in Cairo in December 2010 by Rebecca Chiao, Engy Ghozlan, Amel Fahmy and Sawsan Gad as a volunteer-run response to endemic street sexual harassment in Egypt. Anyone can submit a report of harassment by SMS, web form, email or social media; HarassMap verifies each report before plotting it, anonymised, on a public map of incidents.

The mapping data feeds an offline 'Safe Areas' programme: volunteers visit hotspots and work with shopkeepers, doormen, university staff and companies to adopt a zero-tolerance policy — committing to intervene and impose social consequences when harassment occurs nearby. HarassMap does not claim its Safe Areas are free of harassment; the model is explicitly that harassment will meet a visible social response rather than silence.

The organisation's own 2014 study, 'Towards a Safer City: Sexual Harassment in Greater Cairo,' analysed roughly 1,470 crowdsourced reports (in Arabic and English) using topic modelling, finding harassment concentrated in streets and transport and associated overwhelmingly with fear, anger and sadness in victims' accounts — evidence about the problem's shape, not a before/after measure of the programme's effect on harassment rates. HarassMap won the 2011 World Summit Youth Award and the 2012 Deutsche Welle 'Best of Blogs' award for Best Use of Technology for Social Good, and its model has reportedly been referenced or adapted by civil-society groups in other countries, though no independent, controlled evaluation of its effect on harassment prevalence has been published. It remains active in 2026.

Read the full analysis: https://harassmap.org/en/