Safecity App
Safecity aims to make cities safer by encouraging equal access to public spaces for everyone, especially women, through the use of crowd sourced data and technology.
Key Facts
- UN Women states that 1 in 3 women face some kind of sexual assault at least once in their lifetime.
- Safecity is a platform that crowd sources personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces.
- This data which may be anonymous, gets aggregated as hot spots on a map indicating trends at a local level.
- A rape occurs every 20 minutes in India. Yet most women and girls do not talk about this abuse for a multiple of reasons.
- The organization has collected over 18,500 reports from all over India, Kenya, Nepal and other countries.
Key Features
The Red Dot Foundation Group works at the intersection of gender, technology, communications, data and urban planning and Safecity is its flagship program.
Safecity is a platform that crowd sources personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. This data which may be 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 behavior that leads to violence and work on strategies for solutions.
Safecity aims to make cities safer by encouraging equal access to public spaces for everyone, especially women, through the use of crowd sourced data and technology.
Social Impact
The pervasive nature of sexual violence globally led us to set up two organizations under the brand name Red Dot Foundation.
UN Women states that 1 in 3 women face some kind of sexual assault at least once in their lifetime. But in our experience, the statistics in India seem to be extremely high. A rape occurs every 20 minutes 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 neighborhood level. Since our launch on December 26, 2012 we have collected over 18,500 reports from all over India, Kenya, Nepal and other countries.
Future Plans
We plan to consolidate our work in the countries where we are currently present and upscale to additional 5 cities in India.
Main Target Group
Our main target audience is women/girls who are victims of sexual harassment due to a patriarchal culture.
Main User
Authorities like police, corporations and individuals (women, girls, youth).
