While stuck in traffic, a man in a car beside her who looked in his forties shamelessly started blowing her kisses while displaying utter indifference to how offended and uninviting she was. The 24-year-old’s car window was broken and didn’t open for her to lash back at him — anger consumed her and felt she had to do something to defend herself.

So she pulled her phone out and started taking pictures of him.

“I was in my car, he couldn’t see my body and I’m veiled; so [there was] nothing arousing at all. I was angered,” says Rana, whose name we changed upon her request.  “In general, I never used to ignore being harassed or keep quiet about it, unlike what society expects of me.”

Rana wasn’t sure what she was going to do with the photos at first, but she, at least, was able to make him feel uncomfortable in return. She was able to make him feel exposed as he has made her, something evident in the yells he repetitively threw at her asking, “what are you doing?”

Rana was initially thinking of posting the pictures on her personal Facebook account. But then an appealing idea came to her mind — a public Facebook page where she and others could share pictures of harassers and scandalize them. On March 14 she launched Efdah Motaharesh  (scandalize harassers) to do just that.

“In around eight hours the page had 3,000 likes and 25,000 people viewed the picture of the man,” she says. “People started sending me messages telling me this is a great idea.”

The page has reached over 18,520 likes in less than one month, garnering a lot of media attention, something Rana never expected.

“Many girls send me messages everyday that the page inspired them to be strong enough to face sexual harassment and that they will speak up for themselves from now on and won’t resort to silence anymore. The good thing is, these girls don’t feel ashamed anymore,” says Rana.

Faces of harassers, images of inappropriate text messages from unknown numbers, incidents of sexual harassment caught on tape and even success stories of people fighting this horrible national epidemic are uploaded regularly on the page.

In fact, Efdah Motaharesh garnered so much attention that the man’s family saw his photo on the group and, according to his friend who commented on the page, the photo put the harasser in a lot of trouble.

Rana, however, insisted not to remove the photo until the harasser apologized. He did, but kept sending her threats in private messages afterwards. She remained unmoved, fearless, something you sense in her voice as she talks about harassment.

The face behind Efdah Motaharesh

Rana holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and is currently studying for her master’s in anthropology and sociology. Strangely enough and “a coincidence,” she assures, her thesis is about sexual harassment.

Unlike many others, her father actually encouraged the idea of creating this page. She chose that her identity remains anonymous, however, because she doesn’t want the page to be about her, or to steal the attention away from the issue of sexual harassment.

Rana has a strong persistence to fight for what she believes in, and she is definitely very passionate about ending sexual harassment.

“Never underestimate the power of an idea, no matter how common or crazy it might seem,” she concludes. “You never know how much support and help it might offer people [until] you actually go through with it.”