Red Dot Foundation

It is unfortunate that sexual and gender based violence is still a pandemic. It has an adverse impact on how women and girls, who are its main victims, access opportunities and live their lives. In my country India, women's participation in the formal labour force is at 22% and lack of safety coupled with the low status of women is a contributor. However safety or lack of it, is "invisible" due to the under-reporting and silence around it. Safecity, our anonymous reporting platform, bridges the data gap that exists and makes it visible. With the data, action can be taken at the individual, community and institution level.

As a winner, we will use the Elevate Prize to 

a) Bring on board partners who are community based organisations, NGOs, educational institutions to use the data from the Safecity app to create safe spaces and strengthen responses to prevent and address violence.

b) Train 100 youth leaders to be Safecity champions who will use the data to engage civic authorities in Safe spaces

c) Work with local governments and police in 3 cities on a Safe city and neighbourhood agenda.

I am a dreamer and believe that every person has the right to live a life free from worry. As a woman who spent the first 20 years of her career in aviation, I enjoyed the freedom to travel the world, experience new places, meet diverse people, enjoy their culture, food and friendships. Unfortunately that is not the reality for many women who are bound by socio-cultural norms and are affected by harmful gender stereotypes. Much of the violence in India is due to patriarchy and the belief that women are supposed to be subservient to men, seen but not heard, should not have the freedom to move around alone or have any agency without a man. This is reflected in several terrible statistics - high femicide rates, violence against women, low participation in economy and political leadership and more.

I had decided early on that once I reached financial sustainability for myself, I would pay it forward. That moment took place in Dec 2012 when Jyoti Singh was gangraped on a bus in Delhi. I made a career switch to work on prevention of gender based violence so that women could access better opportunities and live a full life.

Sexual and gender based violence is a global pandemic affecting on an average one in three women around the world. In India though the statistics indicate it is much higher. A rape occurs once every 18 mins according to the NCRB. Safecity was launched in December 2012 as an immediate response to the gangrape of Jyoti Singh. The aim was to document anonymous stories of violence, collate it on a map and make it available in open source format as patterns and trends for people to use to improve situational awareness, take community action and demand institutional accountability.

Over the last 8 years we have the largest crowdmap on this topic. We have used the data to get police to change beat patrol timings, increase vigilance; college and school campus administration to institute stronger policies and redressal mechanisms for campus safety; railway authorities to prevent sexual harassment and civic authorities to fix broken infrastructure that causes the violence.

Our dataset has been instrumental in helping further the understanding of what causes such violence especially in public spaces, establish an economic cost to the violence, lobby for better legislation and policies and engage communities in building trust and prevent violence.

Crowdsourcing this kind of dataset is unique as this is a new dataset being created. By collating it in a structured manner, one can use it effectively. The #MeToo movement call to action was similar - put your story out there so that people can understand the scope of the problem. But stories on social media cannot be analysed and there is a "name and shame" element which can be disadvantageous. With the Safecity dataset one can analyse the data by location, category of harassment/abuse, time of day, day of week and brainstorm solutions which are acceptable to the community. It is completely anonymous and is approved before being made public. The data is available to the community and a participatory methodology is encouraged for solutions. So the community is engaged throughout the process, not only to understand the scope of the problem but also what could be the possible solutions and who needs to be brought into the room. Solutions can range from art on walls, street plays, hyper local actions amongst community members, awareness workshops, meetings with police and civic authorities to stronger policies within institutions. The community decides what will work for them and they have agency.

We are giving women a voice and providing a platform to exercise their agency. By encouraging them to document their experiences, we are providing them a vocabulary and helping them break their silence on sexual and gender based violence. In our experience, many women and girls (and for that matter, men and boys) do not fully understand the spectrum of abuse, the socio-cultural factors that encourage it, how to challenge harmful gender stereotypes and unconscious bias and the remedies available to them under the Indian law. This is not part of the formal curriculum. We have trained over 35000 people using the rights framework and 95% of our data has come through these workshops and in person events.

We encourage people to take action against violence using evidence based data and participatory methodology that engages their larger community in finding hyper-local solutions. This has been very effective in building the confidence of young women and girls to break their silence, speak up for themselves, negotiate for higher education and greater freedoms, experiment by moving out of their comfort zones literally and figuratively. Men and boys too have been engaged to be peer educators and advocates to end violence against women/girls.