Aura Freedom International has taken over Nathan Phillips Square with an out-of-home activation that aims to make femicide a household term.

With assistance from Forsman & Bodenfors on creative, Veritas Communications on PR and Twenty6Two on media, the feminist organization launched its “Behind Closed Doors” campaign over the weekend to coincide with Doors Open Toronto, an annual event that gives the public access to buildings that are normally shuttered.

A public OOH installation in the downtown Toronto urban square kicked off the campaign, which calls attention to the fact that a woman or girl is killed every 48 hours in Canada – most often at by someone she knows. Seventy-seven per cent of femicides in 2024 were committed in private residences, according to the organization.

“Intimate-partner violence and men’s violence against women in general is often hidden away,” Aura Freedom executive director Marissa Kokkoros tells strategy. “So what better way to discuss it than in the most open and visible way possible, which is in front of City Hall in Canada’s largest city and during a weekend when many people will be out and about.”

Aura Freedom and Forsman & Bodenfors also collaborated on “The Body Bag for Her” campaign in 2023, which leaned into classic advertising tropes to call attention to femicide. Toronto declared intimate-partner violence an epidemic later that year but most jurisdictions in Canada have yet to follow.

Kokkoros says one of the key challenges in Aura Freedom’s cause-driven marketing is to unflinchingly draw attention to a violence epidemic without resorting to violent imagery.

“We’re very aware that folks might not expect to see an installation on violence against women in their city’s main square tomorrow,” Kokkoros says. “We’re not interested in making femicide easier to swallow, because we shouldn’t be accepting it. So we balance that boldness. We balance it by not showing actual scenes or depictions of violence, we don’t show bruised faces. That’s never been Aura Freedom’s style.”

Finding a clever way to deliver an uncomfortable, yet impactful, message is key for a grassroots organization with limited budget. Kokkoros says Forsman & Bodenfors’s creative team put in the work to become educated on the issue of femicide and deliver a nuanced message that sticks.

“If we think back to the PSAs of years gone by – those messages we absorbed as kids about smoking and seat belts and other public-health issues – we see them embedded right in the way we view things and the way we address them. So, we’ve never really done that for violence against women, despite it being an epidemic and a pandemic worldwide. So I think this is a really important way of mainstreaming the information.”

“Behind Closed Doors” runs through June 8 and includes a radio spot and media placements across Toronto on highway boards, the TTC, GO Transit and in Sankofa Square.