Safecity aims to make cities safer, India

Project name: Safecity

Project location: India and Global

Website: http://safecity.in

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/safecity.in
Twitter: https://twitter.com/pinthecreep

Project description:

Safecity is a platform that crowdsources personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. This data which maybe anonymous, gets aggregated as hot spots on a map indicating trends at a local level. The idea is to make this data useful for individuals, local communities and local administration to identify factors that causes behaviour that leads to violence and work on strategies for solutions.

Since our launch on 26 Dec 2012 we have collected over 10,000 stories from over 50 cities in India, Kenya, Cameroon, Nepal, Nigeria and Trinidad & Tobago.

We are registered as a not for profit in the United States as Red Dot Foundation Global and in India as Red Dot Foundation.
 

Goal and purpose of the project:

Our Mission: Safecity aims to make cities safer by encouraging equal access to public spaces for everyone especially women, through the use of crowdsourced data, community engagement and institutional accountability.

Our main objective is to: Create awareness on sexual harassment and abuse and get women and other disadvantaged communities to break their silence and report their personal experiences.
Collate this information to showcase location based trends.
Make this information available and useful for individuals, local communities and local administration to solve the problem at the local level.

Target group:
Our main target audience are women/girls who are victims of sexual harassment due to a patriarchal culture.

Motivation of the applicant / applicant team:

We started this initiative post the horrific gang rape of a young woman Jyoti Singh in Delhi on a bus. Since then we have realised that sexual violence is a global pandemic.

UN Women states that 1 in 3 women face some kind of sexual assault at least once in their lifetime. But in our experience, these statistics are grossly under reported especially in India where a rape occurs every 20 mins in India.

Yet most women and girls do not talk about this abuse for a multiple of reasons - fear of society, culture, victim blaming, fear of police, tedious formal procedures etc. As a result women keep silent and this data is not captured anywhere but the perpetrator gets bolder over time and we accept it as part of our daily routine. This leads to under communication and under reporting of the issue. If there are poor official statistics, the problem is not visible and is not a true representation of the actual problem. Therefore we need to break our silence and document every instance of harassment and abuse in public spaces so that we can find the most effective solutions at the neighbourhood level.

We are creating a new data set which currently does not exist. By representing the information thus collected on a map as hotspots, we are moving the focus away from the "victim" to the location and people can view the issue with a different lens. Today we make choices for pretty much everything based on reviews - books, movies, restaurants, hotels but we have nothing for personal safety.
 

Use of prize money:

The Prize Money will be used to establish ourselves in a new city and community in India. Patna, Bihar is one of the most lawless states in India. We would like to establish our presence there and work with the police and other NGO stakeholders there to alleviate crimes against women and girls.