Transport for London encourages customers to come together and stand against hate. TfL continues to work hard to tackle hate crime and abuse on the London transport network with campaign that encourages solidarity among customers.

‘Stands against Hate – Bystander Intervention’ equips travellers with three helpful intervention techniques and the confidence to intervene if they witness an incident.

Everyone has the right to use public transport without fearing that they will be abused or experience a hate crime. This is why Transport for London has a zero tolerance approach to all forms of abuse on its network and keeping customers safe is its top priority.

As part of its commitment, TfL, with the help of agency of record VCCP London and Wavemaker UK has launched the integrated ‘TfL Stands against Hate – Bystander Intervention’.

Bystanders can play an important role in preventing or discouraging incidents before they can and help victims feel less isolated.

To ensure that this campaign is helpful to customers, TfL, VCCP and Wavemaker UK worked together closely with a team of experts to identify what actions people could take. They also worked with customer focus groups as the campaign developed to make sure it was informed by the people who will be using the transport network.

Through research, TfL identified a genuine knowledge gap around indirect interventions like engaging with the victim of abuse rather than confronting the perpetrator and how this was more likely to diffuse the situation. This follows behavioural research revealing that 63% of customers said they would feel more confident in intervening in an incident if they had more information on how to help.

London-based Illustrator, Raj Dhunna, developed the campaign creative, taking into consideration the customer research. The campaign features distinctive illustrations that bring to life the different ways that travellers can safely intervene if they witness a hate crime or abuse. To achieve the executions Raj created visuals of a mouth, eyes and teardrops to visually convey the action people take. The three campaign executions are each based on specific behavioural asks, and within each the language has been crafted to be clear but also accessible to customers so that they feel empowered to safely intervene in an incident if they are a witness:

  1. Distract (mouth): Ignore the offender and ask the targeted person simple, calm questions

  2. Document and report (eyes): Note specific details of what you’ve seen and report the incident

  3. Support (teardrops): After the event, offer help to the targeted person


Alongside the iconic TfL branding, the creative also utilises the same colour palette and similar illustrative style to the existing ‘Stands against Hate’ campaign to ensure consistency and connection between the two.

Find out more on VCCP.