São Paulo’s women say enough and team up to map catcalling.

Chega de Fiu Fiu, which translates into English as ‘Enough with the Catcalls’, publishes an online map on which any girl or woman can fix a pin on the street where she has been harassed, along with an account of what happened. The scheme started in São Paulo but has since gone nationwide. Founder Juliana de Faria says she was moved to start the project when she read a Facebook post about being hassled on the streets and realised it was the first time she’d ever read anything about a problem that was deep-seated and ubiquitous in Brazil. She runs the blog with three other women, and hopes the map idea will spread to other countries.

It’s not all about catcalls; stories range from accounts of being grabbed and groped to threats and levels of intimidation that made women fear a rape scenario might unfold. Juliana has partnered with the Public Attorney’s Office of São Paulo to write a guide on street harassment and what women can legally do about it. Her project has been featured in numerous media outlets, and she’s now shooting a documentary. In 2014 the Clinton Foundation and Cosmopolitan magazine selected de Faria as one of eight women smashing the glass ceiling around the world.

Chega de Fiu Fiu was submitted to the Atlas by Camila Achutti, the tech FutureFixer and software engineer behind Mulheres na Computação (Women in Computing).  

Editor’s update, September 2021

The documentary, directed by Amanda Kamanchek and Fernanda Frazão, premiered in 2018. Since then, it’s travelled fast — it reached over 13 thousand people from 16 countries and was screened in more than 20 national and international film festivals as well as the Brazilian Congress.

You can watch the trailer below:

In 2020, the team carried out nationwide research to provide data on sexual harassment in the workplace. It was the first research to approach online and offline work, tackling the changes in work dynamics brought about by the pandemic.

A partnership between Think Olga and Think Eva (Chega de Fiu Fiu’s sister organisation) launched the campaign #TrabalhoSemAssédio (harassment-free workplace), sponsored by LinkedIn. The research was featured in 91 media articles, presented in several online events hosted by private and public institutions such as Tribunal de Contas da União (TCU), International Labour Organization (ILO) and UN Women.

Chris has been writing on travel, tech, sex, food, art and books for nearly two decades. He co-founded street paper Hecho en Buenos Aires, writes regularly for the Guardian and Telegraph newspapers, and is now writing a thriller set in Andalusia.