TW: murder
According to police figures, almost 250,000 street attacks, mainly on women, took place across England and Wales in the 12 months after the murder of Sarah Everard, and at least 125 women have been murdered in that same time period. Many of these women's faces never make the news, but there a handful whose cases become high profile, including that of Zara Aleena - a 25-year-old, who was murdered on Sunday 26 June while she was walking home in East London - and Hina Bashir - who was working part-time as a security guard at Queen Mary University while studying business and was reported missed after she didn't arrive at work on Thursday 14 July.
In the wake of each of this cases, an outcry can be seen and heard, across social media and beyond, asking for more to be done to protect the safety of women. “We just want to walk home in peace,” one Twitter user wrote after Wayne Couzens, a police officer, was found guilty of her rape and murder, while another asked: “What has to happen for the safety of women to be at the forefront of the agenda?”
As part of a response to outcry, and in a bid to help women - and their families - feel safer, the Government Home Office launched the StreetSafe tool, as well as backing various other safety apps, including Path Community, a free app that encourages crowdsourced safe routes home by allowing users to flag potentially unsafe and unlit sections of streets, underneath bridges. The Street safe tool allows women to anonymously flag up areas where they feel unsafe. Developers of the tool say that certain areas can feel unsafe due to environmental issues, like poor lighting, abandoned buildings, vandalism, or behaviours, such as being followed or verbally abused. These factors may enable offenders to either commit or conceal a crime and so, in theory, highlighting these ‘zones’ on a shared mapping app might help women to make more informed choices about their route. Although, let's be clear, the onus of safety should never fall on a woman herself, no one is doing anything ‘wrong’ by taking the fastest route home at night or walking through dimly-lit areas.
So, the big question is, has the tool actually made women feel safer? Well, among those we asked, it wasn't particularly clear-cut.
Lots of women hadn't even heard of the tool, or the Community Path app. Several said that they would look into using it now they were aware of its existence but were perplexed that more hadn't been made of its development in order to alert as many women as possible. “I've literally never heard of it,” Aisha F told me. “I actually did download a sort of panic button app and various other things after the news of Zara [Aleena], but I don't even remember that coming up.”
Marie Mantan felt more positively about the tool. "It's helped me feel more proactive about my own safety, and I often send the link to the reporting tool to friends or people on Twitter to encourage them to report areas where they've mentioned they feel unsafe.
“Has it banished all safety concerns? No, but I've definitely used it and made different choices because of it.”
And Tali Baum felt similarly. “I've researched the tool quite a bit and have seen that police departments in various areas have said that they use the data reported via the tool to inform their policing decisions and help them to better protect girls and women in their communities. I think it's this element that has made me feel safer since its launch and I really hope that more and more safety bodies use it to help in the same way.”
Many, though, still believe it isn't enough. Jess Phillips, the shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding, said in a public statement: “In the year since Sarah Everard was killed, more women have been killed at the hands of men than in the year before. We should know all of their names. A year on since the public demanded better, we have seen more women killed, rape charging falling, women making it clear that they do not feel safe.
“Too little progress has been made, and still there are no answers from the government about how they will manage, monitor and prevent the most violent repeat offenders. It is not good enough.”
While Jodie Keane, a university student in Hull, told me: “It isn't enough to just tell women to download an app and take extra time keeping it up-to-date. I would prefer better policing, more done about proper street lighting and schemes put in place to educate more men on how they can better protect, or watch out for women.”
And one woman, a mother of two girls herself, said she felt something close to despair when she read that this was the government's response to the Everard case. “At the time, I listened to the police giving out advice like, ‘flag down a bus’, and I remember feeling just so saddened and deflated. It all just felt like more things for women to do and none of them felt as though they'd realistically be effective if a serious situation began to unfold.
“I feel like this tool is just another way that the government is clutching at straws, because they're not really sure what to do - or don't want to spend the money doing it - and so it's easier to ask women to spend their lives manically updating maps and endeavouring to flag down buses if they feel unsafe.”
In short, the reaction is certainly not a resoundingly positive one but, in the absence, of greater changes across society so far, it's useful to know what tools are available to us. So, will we wait for more to be done, will you download the app?
You can find the link to the StreetSafe tool here.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qLjApqauqp2WtKLGyKecZ5ufY8Kse8Crq6KbnJp8tMDRnpytZaOWs6Z506impQ%3D%3D