HELEN MIRREN’S CALL TO ACTION

DAME HELEN MIRREN was in the gym recently when she saw a class of schoolgirls. ‘There was this guy hanging around and very creepily saying, “I’ll show you how to use the machine,” and leaning over them. And the teacher was just ignoring the whole thing. I thought I should really go up and say, “That guy is hassling the girls and you should deal with it.” And I didn’t. I didn’t know how to do it. And I feel guilty about that.’

Dame Helen, a L’oréal Paris Global Ambassador, knows how it feels to be on the receiving end of such behaviour. She used to experience harassment ‘sometimes sort of every day. It makes you feel profoundly uncomfortable and disgusted. And also, you blame yourself.’

Asking other women if they’d experienced the same, she found many had. ‘If it happens to almost every single woman I know, that’s an enormous number of men going around doing this,’ she says.

A L’oréal Paris survey with IPSOS found 78% of women have experienced harassment in public space and 86% of us don’t know what to do when we witness it. In response, L’oréal Paris and NGO Hollaback have launched ‘Stand Up to Street Harassment’, a global bystander intervention training programme to give people the tools to defuse situations. They aim to train a million people.

‘You reach a certain age and it stops,’ Dame Helen adds. ‘That sort of extreme behaviour is targeted only at really young girls, which is incredibly disturbing, because they have no tools to deal with it.’ Her experiences changed her outlook. ‘It killed my sense of romance, that’s for sure.’

As she says, ‘The more people reclaim the public space, I think the more the behaviour will change.’

Sign up for the Bystander Intervention Training programme at standup-international.com/ gb/en/training/landing