Safecity - crowdmapping sexual violence in public spaces

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.

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.

We are creating a new data set which currently does not exist.

We believe that if women and girls are given the tools - information and knowledge - to address sexual violence, they will be more confident to speak up and break their silence. This will lead to more positive action to seek help and solutions and lead to safer cities and communities.

We have successfully used the online data that women and girls share to engage communities, police, municipal and transportation authorities to find local solutions. Police have changed beat patrol timings and increased vigilance, municipal authorities have fixed street lighting and made safe public toilets available.

We want women and girls to be able to share their stories of sexual violence anonymously.

They will benefit because these stories will be documented and made available in the public domain. 

We are creating a new data set which currently does not exist. Perception of the police's insensitivity as well as cultural backlash deters people from reporting. 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.

Track downloads in the app store - 100000 people in India downloaded our app

Case studies and focus group discussions including data on the app - Safecity chapters in 5 countries other than India

Number of times that government or policy makers were engaged and ideas accepted. - New strategies for policy change

It is a unique way to address sexual violence. Also this information for social and cultural reasons do not make it to the official statistics. So in effect we are creating a new dataset which can be used my many different groups in different ways - by individuals to increase situational awareness and improve personal decision making, by communities for local solutions and institutional accountability.

It has its user as its centre. It is her story. She can learn from others and how they dealt with the situation. She does not "feel alone". By sharing stories, you build solidarity. By sharing, you create a dataset that can be used to drive accountability and find solutions by exposing the problem.

Internet, mobile, offline.

We plan to access government and corporate grants, private donations and generate revenue through consultancy, data analysis and visualisation.

There may be pushback from governments on this kind of data collection.

Individuals may be reluctant to share their stories as it is deeply painful.

https://twitter.com/pinthecreep

https://www.facebook.com/safecity.in

http://safecity.in

We have our mobile app that will be launched globally on 21 Sept 2017. We need help scaling the solution. We believe we have a solution that can be used successfully in different parts of the world and we would like to get it out there to as many people as possible, have them adopt it and get them to use the data for local change.

Kenya - Polycom Development Project

Nepal - SEEW

India - Police in Mumbai, Delhi and Goa. Amnesty International, Point of View, SheThePeople, Action India 

We don't have competitors but the closest are Safetipin which audits areas on safety parameters.