Safety to humans is paramount, however, interactions with their daily environments are underscored by their notions of fear. People come to associate places based on whether or not they feel safe within them.
This idea was discussed Monday afternoon in the Parrington Forum by researcher and Delhi, India native, Kalpana Viswanath.
The event, hosted by the UW Women’s Center, attracted a diverse audience of women and featured Viswanath and the new application she co-founded, Safetipin, which is contributing to her goal of making cities more gender inclusive.
“When we talk about safety we sometimes only tend to focus on actual acts of violence,” Viswanath said. “But actually, what our research is showing is that the lack of safety, the fear that I might not be safe, in fact has a lot of repercussions on the lives of young women.”
Everyday life is impacted by the fact that women do not feel safe in the spaces they inhabit. Women, whether consciously or not, compromise their lives according to these potential threats. Women cannot always safely walk through cities without threats, they feel scared to move around at night, and they are dependent upon protection, Viswanath said.
“Generally women face more restrictions on actually being able to participate in social life and economic life in cities because of the fear of violence,” Viswanath said.
It is because of this inhibition of daily life and the fact these spaces are not truly inclusive that Viswanath and her colleague Ashis Basu co-founded the Safetipin app for use in Delhi.
“It’s kind of an online, mobile phone application which collects data on cities through either crowdsourcing or through other methods of collecting data,” Viswanath said.
Through the application, users can make their community safer by filing safety audits about the places they visit. It’s a map-based program that lets users file reports about physical parameters, like the amount of lighting in an area or the state of the streets and harassments encountered such as cat calling, inappropriate touching, or even sexual assault.
“What happens through doing it with an app is you can get a much wider reach, many more people can contribute their perceptions on safety, around safety, and they can also see that information from other people who have made audits,” Viswanath said.
There are other tools on the app as well, including locations of the closest police stations and hospitals and a tracking device that allows a user to send their location to one of their contacts when they feel unsafe. A user is also able to record how safe they feel in an area, information that is crucial to understanding the safety of these spaces, Basu said.
“Feeling is something we live with all of our life,” Basu said. “And now [because of this data] we actually have a predictive model, we can predict based on the parameters in Delhi how safe a person will or will not feel.”
The collection of this data provides a map with red, yellow, or green markers that alert a user to the safety of those areas.
“It works toward prevention, it works toward understanding what makes public spaces safe, what makes them unsafe, and thereby responding to it, thereby being able to produce recommendations which can be given to policy makers to respond to the lack of safety in our public spaces,” Viswanath said.
In fact, Viswanath and Basu have successfully mapped all of Delhi, they said. And data they provided about a particular neighborhood spurred the local police department to alter their patrol routes.
Wendy Wei, a UW junior, said she would like to see the app become global.
“I think this app itself is really fascinating because I’ve never heard about such an app before and it’s really helpful,” Wei said. “I imagine if I had the access to this app, I could definitely report some places that are unsafe.”
Sutapa Basu, the executive director of the UW Women’s Center, had the same thought.
“I’m really fascinated by this research,” Basu said. “I would love to see something like this for Seattle.”
Safetipin is a free app that is currently being used to continue safety mapping Delhi and is now being implemented in Bogota, Colombia, and Nairobi, Kenya.
“It’s really a tool that’s in the hands of citizens to impact change,” Viswanath said.
Google Play Store… Personal & Women Safety App
Google Play Store… GPS Tracking & Family Tracking App
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