The Australian capital Canberra has just announced a new website and app for women to tag the places they feel scared being on their own. A ‘safe spaces’ app, no less.
The Women’s Centre for Health Matters, that developed the Safety Mapping Tool, explains that it “has been developed to gather information from Canberrans (particularly women) about the public places and spaces where they feel safe or unsafe.”
The WCHM hope that the safety map will help women and public safety officials “understand what elements contribute to spaces being perceived to be safe or unsafe.” Women can avoid the areas that are most low-lit, isolated, or quiet, whilst local governments can receive further evidence (if it were needed) that women are often made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe when going about their daily lives.
By 2030, some 5 billion people worldwide are expected to be living in cities. New technology is being developed across the globe to help alleviate some of the fear of sexual harassment and violence that is a daily reality for women and girls in public places, particularly in urban areas — restricting their freedom of movement, reducing access to services, and negatively impacting their well-being and community.
While the Canberra safety mapping tool is being hailed as a success in the trend for tech designed to keep women safe, the majority of women will be left wondering if collecting data on the problem really constitutes doing enough.
Whilst I appreciate the effort, do we really need to collect data on where and why exactly women feel unsafe to tell us what we already know? What poses a threat to women is not slightly-obscured walking routes or poorly-placed overhead street lighting. It’s men, or at least a minority of them.
I’ve seen initiatives like this come and go before, and little has changed. You can collect all the data you want, you can even light up every street like a Christmas tree. But until men are willing to seriously and deeply investigate the epidemic of their violence against women, we will still be unsafe.
Believe me, I want to be excited about how technology is empowering women. But I don’t need an app to tell me what I already know about women’s safety: that the burden of responsibility is on women to protect themselves from men.
It is frankly insulting that if a woman is being stalked, followed, or intimidated and she finds herself about to be made a victim in a public space, her best bet is to wait on local officials to collect data about how the situation makes her feel. Sure, data can be useful. But is it enough?
Maybe a more efficient way for women to address the issue of feeling unsafe is to equip ourselves with something a little more effective than an app and a vague urban planning policy?
App will collect “gendered” data about how people use Canberra’s transport systems, public spaces & facilities https://t.co/ayFUw05BIn
— Cosain (@cosaingalway) September 9, 2016
Look at the statistics. In 2014, males were convicted of the vast majority of homicides in the United States, representing 90.5 % of the total number of offenders. Males constituted 98 % of those arrested for rape. Males accounted for 80.4 % of persons arrested for violent crime.
And yet we can’t seem to have an open conversation in which the disparity of who is committing what types of crime is exposed. Because that is just far too uncomfortable for everyone to handle.
When it comes to ensuring women’s safety, increasingly innovative technology is not the whole solution. In fact, if it makes it easier for sexual predators to know where women are most vulnerable, it could exacerbate the very problem it is designed to solve.
Men are victims of male violence too, and when it comes to the victimization of both women and men, we need to consider personal responsibility and whether we as a society want to promote it or distort its importance.
This is not an issue of empowering women with technology. It’s an issue of men being unable to own up to a predominantly male problem and take responsibility for being the solution.
Ladies: until they do so, a concealed carry permit will be of more use than a ‘safe spaces’ app .
