![]() ![]() Co-author Sameera Khan says she is concerned about an over-reliance on technology to help women feel safe, not least because it means private companies are gathering personal data on their location. It led to an empowerment campaign by women who “loitered” in public spaces in Mumbai, Jaipur and Aligarh. Many of these issues were highlighted in the 2011 book Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets, which explored women’s right to use public spaces in safety. Separate research by the women’s safety charity Akshara found that 95% of women in India have faced sexual harassment on the streets. Its research in early 2016 found that of 4,300 women, 2,547 had a safety app installed on their mobile phone, yet 72% said they had not used it at all. The campaign group Red Elephant was set up to coordinate safety efforts and provide emotional and legal support to women who have experienced violent on the streets or at home. “For some others it is just a feel-good project and only a few are serious about real solutions,” he says. Osama Manzar, creator of the Digital Empowerment Foundation, says that in the hurry to try and rush out a service to help, not much strategic consideration was given to how connect services to the government. This wave of apps is referred to by some as “saviour” apps. It had good intentions but simply didn’t do the job not a single genuine alarm was raised through the app, which has come to represent the futility of tackling a complex social and cultural problem with crude technology. Yet many of them went the same way as Hawk Eye, an app launched and promoted by police in Hyderabad in 2013. It is just one of 40 different safety apps currently available for women in India. When affordable mobile phones became widespread, attention shifted to dedicated apps, most of which combined a reporting system for unsafe areas with and the ability to share location with friends or family, or a panic alarm feature for emergencies.Īn app launched by the Delhi police called Himmat, or “courage” in Hindi, sends out the user’s location to the police control room. ![]() In the aftermath of the attack one question arose: how could women stay safe in public spaces? And perhaps inevitably, many turned to technology to try and create a solution.įirst came a wave of online maps, which women could access in public internet cafes. The brutal rape and subsequent death of a young woman by five men in New Delhi in December 2012 shocked India and the world. ![]() Many other assaults and rapes are believed to be unreported. There were 82,422 recorded assaults against women in 2015, including sexual harassment, voyeurism and stalking and another 34,651 reported rapes. India’s national crime statistics make for grim reading. ![]()
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