Building 20 Million Toilets Is Not Enough To Keep Women Safe In This Country

A 17-year-old girl- Khoobu Kumari- was found hanging from her house ceiling earlier this month on July 4 in Dumka town in Jharkhand. The teenager decided to end her life because her parents refused to comply with her pleas of having a toilet constructed. A BBC report estimates that around 300 million women and girls comprise the total population of open defecators.

Open defecation has become a matter of shame for a country dreaming to bloom into a superpower. Around half the population- a staggering 594 million people- is known to defecate in the open as per UNICEF data.
However, other than earning India the wrong kind of attention, open defecation has other ramifications; one of them being violence against women. Rakesh Johri, a senior fellow at The Energy Resource Institute, estimates that open defecation “exposes a third of the nation’s women to the risk of rape and sexual assault.”

Water Aid- an international organisation working on improving access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene-further explains as to how the potential threat of violence outside affects life choices on an everyday basis. In a study conducted by the organisation in 2011, it was found that women living in slums in Delhi and Bhopal tend to eat and drink less so that they do not feel the need to relieve themselves often.

In 2014, even Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s in his Independence Day address to the nation expressed concerns regarding safety of rural women, who go out to defecate- “The poor womenfolk of the village wait for the night; until darkness descends, they can’t go out to defecate. Can’t we just make arrangements for toilets for the dignity of our mothers and sisters?” As a result, constructing 20 million toilets became the dream project for the year.

But is having more toilets the answer to all our woes? No. For even if toilets are constructed within household premises or at public places, as long as the public space is marked out as masculine, violence against women in public spaces is going to haunt India anyway. The polarisation of the domestic and public space as feminine and masculine, respectively, is what makes women who venture out being characterised as unfeminine, morally loose and thus assailable or punishable. So much so that even the most natural and obvious functions- walks, defecation, shopping, travelling, etc. – that entail venturing out into the already overtly masculine public space becomes dangerous.

According to a 2011 Thomson Reuters’ Trustlaw Women’s survey on the country-wise perception of danger, India is the fourth most dangerous place for women. Unless issues of women’s safety are effectively addressed, social bias against them will continue to exist, leaving the approximately 6 million women who inhabit India today vulnerable to violence.

Let Khoobu not become just a statistic but the precursor of a change we urgently need.
Found on... http://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2015/07/womens-safety-in-india/
Google Play Store... Personal & Women Safety App

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

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

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