Make the streets safer for women.
This is what several projects around the world are looking for, which are using technology to change policies and end harassment.
In the city of Glasgow, Scotland, women are collecting data on their experiences of violence and harassment on the streets.
This is an online map for women to fill out with reports of harassment, including stalking, intimidation and sexual assault.
“He was about three or four steps behind me and tried to enter the door of my house when I took out the keys”, writes a user, “but when I asked him what he was doing and I told him that my boyfriend was inside, he ran away”.
The project is run by Wise Women, a community safety network, and aims to identify the top places where bullying incidents occur.
Dawn Fyfe, Strategic Development Worker at Wise Women , hopes to influence politicians and urban planners to make the city a safer space for women.
“We know that harassment and abuse of women is happening in public spaces” , she told the BBC.
“We can use this to provide an informed contribution to strategic approaches to violence against women and influence any change that occurs.”
Data in Glasgow will be collected over three months until March 1, with initial findings shared on International Women’s Day March 8.
The women behind the project hope that the scheme can be extended and even implemented nationally in the UK in the future.
Mapping of harassment
The aggregation of geographic data of people to create an updated digital map, -the so-called “crowdmapping”- has already been used in the past to fight against street harassment .
In 2010, a group of volunteers in Egypt created HarassMap, which allows women to anonymously report incidents of abuse in public spaces.
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A survey of the time conducted by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights indicated that the 82% of the citizens and the 98% of foreign women suffered some kind of harassment in public.
“Before we started, there were no other people who linked the work traditional community linkage with digital in this area”, says Rebecca Chiao, one of the founders of HarassMap.
“I think we were the first to do that”.
They launched it just before the Arab Spring in 2011, which coincided with a huge increase in social media engagement across Egypt that Chiao says contributed to the success of her platform.
“Just seeing the reactions of people reading the anonymous reports was amazing”, he recalls.
“Some reports were very emotional or graphic and it was not something that women in Egypt felt comfortable talking about openly, maybe with friends, but definitely not with family or publicly”.
“I was walking alone and a worker kept calling me, looking at me and trying to get my attention. Her colleagues also laughed and looked at me”, wrote one user.
Another reported an experience of indecent exposure and intimidation.
“I was walking home at night and a taxi driver stopped in front of me, got out of the car, unbuttoned his pants and started to touch I turned the corner and pretended to go into one of the buildings, and then he drove slowly by trying to see if he had gotten in.”
However, HarassMap no longer collects anonymous reports because the laws in Egypt related to data collection have changed.
Instead, its international arm now advises and supports the launch of platforms in other countries and shares its experience to achieve zero tolerance in harassment in the public sphere and in private spaces.
Chiao says that one success story that HarassMap has helped include is SafeCity, which started in India and has since expanded to other countries including Nepal, Kenya and Nigeria.
“A worldwide problem”
Safe City was founded by ElsaMarie D’Silva and her friends in December of 2011 in reaction to the brutal gang rape and murder of student Jyoti Singh on a bus in Delhi.
“We wanted to do something immediately,” explains D’Silva. “It is a global problem and there is underreporting everywhere”.
“Tools like SafeCity are an excellent way to report your experience in an anonymous and we believe that documenting it is the first step to receive justice”.
The map collects cases of harassment, including taking photos, whistling, indecent exhibition and public masturbation.
“Women often instinctively know that what has been done to them is wrong, but they do not always know that they have the right to report it” , says D’Silva.
“SafeCity builds a community of support and shared experience. It is a healing document and develops the capacity for situational awareness”.
D’Silva says that they have taken the data to the authorities and the reaction has been positive to increase the safety of women in the critical areas through new measures, including more police patrols and the presence of closed circuit television.
“Women and girls feel safer reporting and raising the alarm and can stay outside later and do more with your time”, he says.
“The world doesn’t stop at 7 pm”, he says.
That’s exactly why, in response to calls from its users, the Citymapper global route finding app now offers routes that may not necessarily be the fastest, but may be the most populated or best lit.
The “Major Roads” feature provides specific options for when traveling after dark.
“Highways more lively and well lit, easy to memorize and to avoid parks and alleys”, Gilbert Wedam, chief designer of Citymapper, told the BBC.
“The ‘best’ route is not always the most but it largely depends on the context in which one finds oneself”.
Similarly, an entrepreneur in Recife, Brazil, sought to fill the huge data gap on harassment complaints in her country and find a solution to make the streets safer.
Simony Cesar is the founder and CEO of NINA, a technology that can be integrated into other apps, including route planning and ride-sharing apps, to enable reporting of harassment.
“In official government data, it’s as if the problem doesn’t exist. stiera”, she affirms.
Include women in decision-making
Cesar’s mother worked in a public bus and talked about how difficult it was for women to travel to and from work.
When Cesar grew up, she herself saw and experienced the reality of harassment on public transport.
“I met many women who would leave school or their job simply to avoid the fear of public transport”, she says.
A recent survey conducted by a women’s safety net, Instituto Patrícia Galvão/Locomotiva, found that the 81% of women reported experiencing any type of violence in their cities in Brazil.
A public security NGO, Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, estimates that there is one case of harassment every four seconds on public transport in Brazil.
NINA works by integrating with other applications by providing a button to easily report incidents of harassment or assault, providing data to Cesar and your computer.
“The data collected by us is used to prove that there is a real problem”, it states.
“We take the information to the authorities and promote the development of policies that make cities safer, more inclusive and liveable, especially for women”.
Back in Scotland, United Kingdom, Dawn Fyfe highlights the same need for women’s voices to be heard more.
“We want women to be included in decision-making so that their experiences are at the center of solutions in urban planning.”
“It’s misogyny in plain sight and we have to respond to stop it at the root,” he told the BBC.
“We want to achieve a change now, enough is enough”.
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