National Commission For Lebanese Women: Campaign

Challenge

The National Commission for Lebanese Women and the United Nations Population Fund have collaborated during the 16 Days of Activism against Gender- Based Violence in 2017 for a campaign against the normalization of cultural violence. Our challenge was to amplify the need for a societal mobilization against stereotyping of women in practices, social behaviors and cultural common sayings, and alert on the social and psychological impact of this cultural violence, by creating a campaign on TV, outdoor and online with a strong and clear slogan and hashtag.

Idea

The first objective of this campaign is to highlight that verbal and cultural abuse is actually violence. Therefore we exposed some of the cultural common jokes and sayings about women by using speech bubbles, and reversed the subject to “men”. That way, we tried shedding the light that these sayings, although perceived as normal when it comes to women, will not be accepted if they were subject to men, where from the hashtag “بتقبلها_على_حالك؟”. Hence we emphasized on our second objective in a subtle way to show that this violence is not acceptable and needs to be changed by the whole society. The use of the voice over in the animation plays an essential role as it gives authenticity to the quotes in the speech bubbles in order to stress that they are very common sayings and everyone uses them in our society. In contrast, at the end of the animation, the voice over gives a very serious tone to affirm the need of change.