Best 10 Personal Safety Apps For Women Android

1. Safetipin

SafetiPin is a personal safety app designed to keep you safe.It has a complete set of features; GPS tracking, emergency, important contact numbers, directions to safe locations, pins showing safe and unsafe areas,and a Safety Score.It goes well beyond typical women safety apps, and provides a wide range of features, that help you proactively plan and respond to situations affecting your personal safety. Download From Here

2. VithU App

No one has the time to dial an emergency number when they are in danger. The VithU App lets a potential victim skip through the number-punching, and lets you push your power button twice to instantly send an SOS alert to contacts. Alert messages are sent out every two minutes to listed contacts, who willreceive a message along with your physical location, which will get updated each time the message goes out. [Get It Here]

3. Circle of 6 App

Circle of 6 is a unique app that lets you connect to up to 6 close contacts. The app has different notifications that the user can tap on to alert their circle. If you need a safe ride home or for a familiar face to turn up and take you away from a strange environment, this app will help send an alert to any of your 6 chosen contacts. On top of that, the app can connect you to the proper authorities for an emergency, or even just for relationship advice. [Get It Here]

4. Life360 Family Locator App

Life360 is a multipurpose app to stay in touch with your family members and friends and keep a handle on their location. The app lets you create circles, add people to them and see their locations on a confidential map. This way you’ll be able to always keep track of your family members and confirm that they’re safe and sound. You can share your location with them, or send an alert to your circle members. You can even chat with your circle members for free. As a bonus, you can also use this app to recover your lost or stolen phone.[Get It Here]

5. I’m Shakti App

The I’m Shakti (IMS) app is one that aims to help keep you in control of your “Shakti” (power in Sanskrit). To reach your emergency contact, press the power button 5 times (in 2 seconds) to trigger the app. A preset emergency SMS will be sent along with your GPS location. [Get It Here]

6. Famy Family Chat & Locator App

If you are a parent who has a feisty kid, or one who has to watch over a teenage sibling who has an issue with “personal space”, this may be the locator app you need. The app picks up your exact GPS location and shares the location to the group. Of course, the person whose location is being shared can choose when their location can be disclosed but the app also keeps track of all previous locations and will let users send an SOS message alert when necessary. [Get It Here]

7. Nirbhaya: Be Fearless App

The Nirbhaya App is another app that lets the user send an sms alert or call with a single touch in the event of an emergency. When activated, it will send your precise GPS location to your pre-selected contacts, with exact location updates every 300 meters you move. Other features include the Geo Fence(which helps keep your contacts informed of your location), the ‘Shake to alert’function, and you can use the power button to send out a distress signal. [Get It Here]

9. Watch Over Me App

Watch Over Me is an app that lets your contacts follow you on your journey remotely. The app lets you specify how long you want it to track your GPS location, until you check in from your intended destination.If you fail to do so, it sends anemergency alert to your chosen contacts. Alternatively, in case something bad happens, you can shake your phone to trigger an emergency alert, and your phone’s camera will turn on automatically and start recording. The app also informs you if you’ve entered a high crime rate area. It is available in 7 cities, for now. [Get It Here]

10. Sentinel Personal Security SOS App

The Sentinel Personal security app claims to be the fastest SOS app available in thecurrent market. It lets you send SMS and email alerts, as well as call your emergency contacts when the need arises. The SMS alert will contain yourGPS location, time, and direction of travel. It works even without a working Internet connection or network, which could make the difference between life and death. [Get It Here]

11. Secure Her App

If you stay alone in a place, far from close friends or family, this may be a good alternative app. The Secure Her works by sending out a distress signal as soon as the phone owner double taps on the app’s icon in her phone. Then, a call centre will respond to the distress signal to make sure that help reaches the user. Currently this app is only functional in India, but there are plans to make it available to other parts of the world as well. [Get It Here]

Google Play Store…. Personal & Women Safety App

Google Play Store….. GPS Tracker and Family Tracker

Creating Engagement in Public Spaces for Safer Cities for Women

The rapid pace and nature of urbanization taking place throughout the world has thrown up new challenges for governments, and their populations as well as social scientists and activists. Urban spaces provide new opportunities for people to build their homes and lives, but at the same time reinforce existing inequalities and often create new ones. Gender is a central axis of discrimination along with poverty, disability and other vulnerabilities. While violence and fear may have impacts on the whole population, marginalized groups are much more vulnerable. Women face the fear of sexual violence as a constant threat to their ability to move around, to work and their general well-being.

There is increasing concern about women’s safety in cities over the past few years. The fear of violence in public spaces affects the everyday lives of women as it restricts their movement and freedom to exert their right as citizens of the city – freedom to move, study, work, and leisure. Women, particularly those living in low income settlements, feel unsafe in their settlements after dark as the areas are poorly lit, the streets are not well paved, the drain water overflows on the streets making it tough for them to walk, and the bus stops are often located in a corner of the settlements – forcing them to walk in the dark streets.

Creating safety involves much more than just responding to violence. It is important to create the conditions by which women are able to move about safely and without fear of violence or assault. Fear often plays a key role in women’s experience and access to the city. Therefore in order to create greater levels of safety and comfort, both actual violence and the fear of violence need to be addressed. Research has shown that many factors play a role in determining women’s access to the city including urban design and planning, community involvement, improved policing, usage of space etc.

Keeping this in mind, we developed the mobile app and online platform Safetipin which collects information on public spaces through a safety audit that can be done by anyone, anywhere in the world. In cities everywhere in the world, women’s safety in public spaces is becoming a growing concern. Safetipin is a free app and can be downloaded from the App store or Google play.

Research from different parts of the world show that women face sexual harassment on a regular basis in cities. In India, certainly the gruesome rape and murder in December 2012 has changed public perception of women’s safety and we find both greater reportage of violence and improved response from stakeholders. At the core of Safetipin is the safety audit that measures nine parameters including lighting, the state of the walk path, as well as the presence of people and specifically women, on the streets and ‘eyes on the street’. Each audit appears as a pin on the map and is used to compute the Safety Score of an area.

Safetipin has been designed both as a tool in the hands of individual women who can access information about safety in the city and as a method of collecting data on a large scale for city authorities to use for better planning and governance. An individual user can conduct a safety audit, pin places where she feels unsafe or has faced any form of harassment. She is also able to see all the information that has been uploaded by others and make informed decisions about moving around the city safely. Women (and men) can see the Safety Score of any place in the city and can also use it when they visit new cities.

But Safetipin also seeks to collect large scale information for helping city stakeholders improve safety using data. For the city authority, Safetipin provides large scale data that is crowd sourced and also provides a platform for interaction with citizens on their safety concerns. For example, there are over 6000 audits in the city of Delhi and this has been shared with police, transport and other stakeholders.

In order to help city governments, we are collaborating with UN-Habitat to collect data and address women’s safety in three cities – Bogota, Nairobi and Delhi. The data will be shared with key city stakeholders to ensure that it can feed into initiatives and programs to improve safety. Further, a second round of audits can be conducted to measure the change and impact of programs.

Currently we have data and safety audits in nine Indian cities. The App has also started to be used in Jakarta, Indonesia and Bogota, Colombia. Currently it is available in four languages – English, Hindi, Spanish and Bahasa. We plan to increase this as more cities join the network. We are hopeful that the data that is collected will be useful for city planners to make safer cities for women around the world.
Read more about the SafetiPinRead more about UN-Habitat and gender

Google Play Store… Personal Safety App

City Planning: Built Environment and Personal Safety

City Planning – Built Environment and Personal Safety 

Many researches indicate that real and perceived dangers of personal safety restrict an individual's lifestyles and movement. But still we find that a significant portion of our physical activity like walking, cycling, and physical exercise takes place in the public environment of our neighborhood. Now, is there any link between personal safety and the built environment? Which public policy or urban planning interventions can instill a sense of safety in your neighborhood? Which elements of the urban design and development discourage criminal activity? Can we thwart crime by changing the built environment of our neighborhood?

Crime and the Built Environment 

Today, interest in the link between the physical environment and crime is growing because of increasing crime incidents. The idea of crime prevention through well-thought-out urban design and development plan is attracting particular attention today. This is because of the growing pace of urbanization. Modern city designs in many cases are typically undermining people’s ability to observe public streets. People are restricted to their individual housing units, thus breaking down informal social control of criminal activity. Many city designers view natural surveillance (“eyeballs available on the streets”) as a good deterrent of criminal activities in your neighborhood.

Thus, crime and the physical/built environment are related in an observable and controllable manner. The physical or built environment exerts a direct influence on criminal activities in your neighborhood. It does so by marking territories, increasing or decreasing accessibility by creating or eliminating boundaries and circulation networks, and by facilitating surveillance by the individuals, groups and the police.

SafetiPin provides information about infrastructure and other physical attributes of a place to promote safety for women and other groups. SafetiPin mobile safety app facilitates public policy and urban planning interventions to instill a sense of safety in your neighborhood.

Source... www.safetipin.com

Google Play Store... Download Safetipin App
Apple Play Store...   Download Safetipin App

The Sustainability Challenge for Inner City Safety in Johannesburg

Johannesburg inner city, although less than 130 years old, presents as tired and over-burdened. Developed and evolved as a thriving business hub, the city centre is now home to an estimated more than 500 000 people. The population is multi-cultural and multi-lingual and there is tension amongst widely varying nationalities. Johannesburg Child Welfare (JCW), an NGO that delivers essential outreach services n in the inner city, initiated a project almost three years ago, using the Social Transformation System™ (STS) methodology, to mobilise a collaborative approach to achieving a “best life” for young inner city women and children. The methodology facilitates the drawing of an inclusive, shared transformative spatial and social vision.  Participants agree to an intuitive benchmark starting point or current status and commit to appropriate skills, capacity and resources to move the whole towards this vision.

The project has recruited more than 60 partners since inception; key among these is the Regional City Management of Joburg, including the political office responsible for the area. Other partners range from NGOs and CBOs to Resident Associations and local Businesses. The project is site bound and includes two heritage sites – the Old Drill Hall and St Mary’s Cathedral, both rich in their historical links to the Apartheid struggle.

JCW delivers programmes at the Old Drill Hall to young women, and offers play programmes for children. The area around sites is chaotic. Taxi ranks receive and dispatch over 22000 taxis every day, disgorging 500 000 people into the environment. The streets and pavements are heavily congested and traders, both legal and illegal contribute to constant noise and jostling as well as throwing waste into already clogged storm water drains and gutters. Women suffer endless harassment, thuggery and worse; there is minimal respect for law and order and few places for women to turn when victimized. In the STS visioning process, women aspired to an inner city in which they could walk safely, dress as they pleased, sustain a livelihood and enjoy leisure activities during the day and in at night.

Using the vision as a long term “destination” against which to measure progress, partners in the project initiated a collaborative strategy to improve accessibility, mobility, health and safety of the users of the sites. They did this via a combination of advocacy, urging and supporting all relevant departments of the City to clean and maintain the area and enforce by-laws, and by integrating their efforts to deliver preventative and support services to their users.

Last year on World Aids Day this day, the area was cleaned up and there were real signs of progress. This year however, things had regressed and grime again characterized the precinct; women reported that they were fearful as they walked through the streets and the surrounds of the Cathedral are quite revolting from use as a toilet. The Drill Hall precinct was awash with litter. Clean-up programmes and by-law enforcement campaigns had dwindled in the face of lack of interest of the majority of the ever changing, always conflicted, incoherent “community” that makes up the inner city dwellers. The women delivering essential support and psycho-social services to women in the inner city said they feeling threatened.

The lessons for the partners are hard; for every step forward, there seem to be two backwards. In as much as it is hard to rally and sustain action amongst the protagonists, they continue to strive towards their goals of a safer inner city and a best life for all.

The crucial missing link however is sustained community commitment to this vision. Women are reluctant to participate, often hiding away from formal engagement, many because they are undocumented and fear reprisal, either for themselves or often, for their children. There is a desperate need for collective ownership of place and agency to bring dignity and peace to the inner city. Perhaps where survival takes precedence over all else, it is too much to ask that kindness, respect and love should guide behaviour and create an environment that protects the vulnerable, nurtures the young and supports the achievement of all.

The STS is premised on the knowledge that complex problems have no simple solutions – and that while they obviously demand collaborative approaches, these are difficult and require above all, resilience. The methodology provides for fully participative longitudinal assessment and inclusion in planning and decision-making based on lessons learned.  The partners will regroup in the New Year and try again, this time with an even greater emphasis on mobilizing inner city “communities” to participate in new behaviours that will benefit them all. The key to sustainable safety for the women of the inner city however, remains elusive.

AUTHOR: 

Barbara Holtmann is a feminist who uses her Social Transformation Systems methodology to harness the voices, skills, interests and capacities of women in community safety and development strategies.

Source…. www.safetipin.com

Google Play Store… Download Safetipin App

Apple Play Store…  Download Safetipin App

Violence Against Women: A Tale of Two Public Cultures

This weekend, the State Commissioner for Police in Victoria Australia, Ken Lay, resigned due to illness in his family. The work that Ken Lay and his predecessor, Christine Nixon, accomplished in changing police culture on violence against women should be honoured.

Intimate partner violence – assault and murder, mostly by men in relationships with women – is the single biggest risk to health for women aged 15 to 44 in Australia. Over the past 15 years, the state police force has not only vastly improved its response to intimate partner violence, but has also been seen as a model for other Australian states to follow.

Christine Nixon, the first Australian woman to lead a state police force, battled entrenched police culture from 2001 to 2009. She led innovation in terms of greatly improving police response to intimate partner violence, often against furious opposition from the association representing police officers. Ken Lay, who took over the top police job in 2011, strengthened and consolidated Nixon’s commitment to battling both sexist police culture and differential treatment of violent offences.

This change in culture was brought to the fore after the rape and murder of Jill Meagher in September 2012. Jill Meagher was a young woman who lived in central Melbourne and worked for the ABC (Australia’s national radio station). She was followed by a serial rapist while walking the few blocks from a local bar, where she had met up from friends, to an alley near her home.

Jill Meagher was one of three women murdered in Victoria the same week, and one of 91 women murdered in the state that year. It is easy to say that her case garnered huge public outcry (with 30,000 people marching on the street where the pub was located, Sydney Road,soon after) because she was young and attractive, middle-class, married, and of European origin. What is harder to recognize is that because she was attacked by a stranger, she fell into a trope: both attacked because of her choice in walking home alone (classic victim-blaming), and seen as an identifiable ‘everywoman’. She wasn’t made anonymous by being put in the basket of those ‘other’ woman who are killed by their male partners.

The conservative state government reacted to the outcry about Jill Meagher’s murder by offering local councils more closed circuit television cameras (CCTV) This response flew in the face of evidence that the presence of multiple CCTV cameras along Sydney Road played no role in either the prevention of her murder, or the apprehension of her killer.

And this was one of those times when the changed police culture mattered. I was at a public meeting in the local council where Jill Meagher was murdered a few months later, debating CCTV. A police officer showed a map of where violent assaults and murders took place in that jurisdiction. There was a slight cluster along Sydney Road, but the most apparent pattern was scattering in residential neighbourhoods. In other words, for the first time in my 25 years of working on violence prevention, I saw violence in the home being mapped alongside violence on streets and in pubs. The sheer absurdity of a localized CCTV response to a problem that is everywhere and affects everyone was brought home, not by a feminist activist, but by a police officer.

In one of its first public statements, the new Victorian state government has announced a commission into family violence. I am cautiously optimistic that the rest of government might catch up, in this instance, to the police.

Source….safetipin.com

Google Play Stare…. Download Safetipin App

Apple Play Store……Download Safetipin App