It’s unfortunate that we still need ad campaigns to remind women to be safe from sexual assault, it’s even more unfortunate that we target these campaigns at women when men cause the vast majority of assaults.
In Vancouver they launched a campaign targeted at men called ‘Don’t Be That Guy’. After running the campaign, which told men not to take advantage of women, the sexual assault rate dropped 10%!
The poster is one of three that went up at bars and around the city last summer as part of a campaign to chip away at the increasing rate of sexual assaults in recent years in Vancouver.
Six months later, Deputy Chief Doug LePard says the Don’t Be That Guy campaign has contributed to a turnaround in statistics on sexual offences in Vancouver.
The rate dropped in 2011 by about 10 per cent, the first time in several years it had gone down.
Hopefully we’ll see more public safety campaigns targeted at people who commit the crimes rather than those that are victims.