Who are we?

A group of Pakistanis teamed up in August 2020 to launch the Aagah Pakistan initiative. It is an attempt to address the paramount problem of street harassment that girls and women face in Pakistan. We want to use available technology and modern research methods to deep dive into the social menace of street harassment.

Disclose: Street harassment is a prevalent issue and yet it is almost invisible to most people. We want to bring awareness to people's collective conscious.

Discuss: As Pakistanis ourselves, we understand the barriers surrounding the open discussion of the issue. We intend to implement a solution that makes it easier to frankly discuss women’s problems and experiences.

Discover the Depth: Through our project we intend to gather information about each incident and conduct research to understand the problem better and design effective solutions.

What do we do?

We believe that the key to a well-designed solution is a well-defined problem. Therefore, we start by understanding the prevalence and depth of this deep-rooted issue. We let women use their own words to describe their experience on our platform and then we work with this first-hand information to design a solution that takes advantage of the latest technology, incorporates innovative study and competent research.

Aagah aims to effectively:

• Raise awareness on the severity and pervasiveness of street harassment in Pakistan
• Unveil hot spots of street harassment through a real time heat map
• Provide a holistic view on factors associated with harassment incidents including not only the victim but the harassers, bystanders, and the community
• Create a support structure for victims

1. Map Incidents

   We aim to create an easy-to use website where any woman in Pakistan can anonymously record an instance of harassment detailing the time, place and other details (we will call this incident). This information will help us create an incident map that can track areas where harassment is more common and aggressive. We encourage women to share their stories each time it happens. We are interested in every recent story to highlight this as an ongoing problem represented through a real-time heat map.

2. Raise Awareness

   One of the many issues with street harassment in Pakistan is that it is ever present across social hierarchies and yet it is misunderstood if not outright ignored by the vast majority of the public. Creating awareness in the masses is a key element in combating the issue. Aagah's marketing methodology relies on harnessing the power of social media to not only spread awareness but persuade women to share their incidents on the Aagah website. We have designed informative and culturally appropriate posts for three platforms Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. We will also reach out to prominent social media influencers of Pakistan to aid us in spreading Aagah's message loud and clear.

3. Combat Harassment and Support Victims

   Aagah will provide resources on our website and social media pages to educate women and community on how to combat harassment as a victim, bystander, and a confidante. We also plan to collaborate with organizations online that have created tried and tested resources to promote these to our own audience.

4. Research & Analysis

   The most important part of the Aagah initiative is the research. We will collect data using incident forms including location, time, demographics, in-incident and post-incident details to inform extensive research into the problem. Data mining, a process of discovering patterns in large data sets together with artificial intelligence, statistics, and database systems, will be used to glean insights into factors related to higher incidents of harassment. We also aim to capture the impact and intensity of these incidents from a victim’s perspective using natural language processing tools. Furthermore, we will also be able to measure repeat victimization and prevalence of incidents, in addition to prevalence of victims.

5. Input to Policy Design

   The objective and subjective picture of harassment incidents will eventually be published as a report to raise the issue to policy makers for determining what tangible steps can be taken to drastically reduce the prevalence of this evil in the community.

Benefits of Aagah

• Personal Security – Women can refer to this map and avoid places with higher rates of harassment, travel in groups or visit with a male chaperon, all of which would reduce the chances of her being harassed.
• Emotional Support – the psychological benefit of women being able to express themselves and help others, thereby creating a support structure.
• Educate and Learn – Readily available resources to help educate others and learn about the problem yourself
• Efficiently Utilizing Resources – Women support groups, social reform groups and even law enforcement can use this map to target their resources in problematic areas rather than guesstimating.
• Promote a culture that recognizes and denounces street harassment rather than being passive bystanders

• Create a knowledge base around the much under researched problem of street harassment. We will use Machine Learning models and Natural Language Processing on the submitted forms and sketch an objective picture of factors strongly associated with harassment incidents.
• Compile real-time data on a large scale that has not been done in Pakistan before.
• Scale – Our model can easily be duplicated for other cities and potentially, even other countries.

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