Sexual violence has rarely been so high on the news agenda. Since allegations against the movie producer Harvey Weinstein started to emerge in October last year, the global problem has finally become a mainstream issue. The United Nations has estimated that one in three women have experienced physical or sexual violence, with 120 million girls around the world having been forced into sex acts.

The repercussions go beyond the physical and psychological toll on individuals who have been attacked. Harassment and fear of violence can impede free movement of girls and women and stop them reaching their full potential, both socially and economically. “If women feel afraid,” says Laura Somoggi, who manages the biennial Womanity award for the prevention of violence against women, “it could undermine their ability to work or go to school or university which affects their empowerment, their rights.” Fear of attack is a bar to women escaping poverty.

On a recent visit to Delhi, Somoggi witnessed the long-term impacts first-hand. “If girls are harassed and tell their parents about it, their parents will tell them not to go to school. They’re not going to try to solve the problem. It’s a massive social issue.”

Part of the problem is that cities have been “planned by men, for men”, says Somoggi, who lives in London but is originally from São Paulo.

While sprawling metropolises cannot simply be razed and rebuilt, a number of measures can be taken to make streets feel safer and to keep women more secure when moving around the city. And more than ever, women are being consulted in planning new urban developments.

Delhi: mapping the city from a female perspective

In June, a panel of world experts polled on global women’s issues by the Thomson Reuters Foundation found India to be the most dangerous country for women. The vicious gang rape and murder of the medical student Jyoti Singh on a Delhi bus in 2012 brought women on to the streets to protest, and along with their fury, grief and fear came powerful ideas for change.

In 2013, Kalpana Viswanath co-founded SafetiPin, an app that aims to help women stay safe by letting users rate streets and areas for safety criteria such as lighting, visibility, people density, gender diversity, security and transportation. It also aggregates safety data, partly provided by its users, for use by local government and planners. SafetiPin now has 51,000 points of data for Delhi alone, and offers users “safest routes”, helping them navigate the city with less risk.

Another function of the app allows women to have someone they trust track their journey. “We find a lot of women are able to travel at night using these two features,” says Viswanath. “It gives them confidence to travel around the city.” And the more women venture out, the busier – and safer – the streets become.

To help make the app’s data comprehensive, SafetiPin’s crowdsourced data is augmented using photography. “We use an app on a windscreen of a moving car which automatically takes photographs every 50 metres,” says Viswanath. “We map the entire city using photographs, and supplement that with user data.” Google Earth and Street View are also consulted for extra perspectives but SafetiPin’s data is dynamic, Viswanath says, responding to a constantly changing city.

In Delhi, the team identified about 7,800 dark spots where the lighting score was zero. Based on this information, says Viswanath, government departments in charge of lighting in the city “improved 90% of the lighting deficit”. SafetiPin has now been contracted by local authorities to make recommendations on how to make metro stations, bus stops, tourist spots, public toilets and parks more woman-friendly.

The free app can be used anywhere in the world. So far there has been significant participation in 50 cities (25 in India) and SafetiPin is advising local authorities or organisations in 10 of them. In Hanoi, for instance, says Viswanath: “They’re building a new metro line and before building it they’ve asked us to do an audit of where they’re going to have their stations. They’re including women’s safety in the design.” In Bogotá, SafetiPin data has been consulted to make bike trails safer, “determining where to improve lighting, place CCTV and place bike stands so women will feel comfortable using them at night,” says Viswanath. Next stop: South Africa – thanks to winning this year’s Womanity award. SafetiPin will team up with a number of local organisations to map areas of safety – and are particularly keen to address the unsafe minibus taxis that many women have to use to travel to work.

Barcelona: designing female-positive public spaces

Collective Point 6 is a cooperative of feminist architects, sociologists and urban planners who have been trying to build equality into Barcelona’s streets for a decade. Visibility is key, says member Sara Ortiz, but there’s more to it than lighting. “In well-lit places where there is no activity, no eyes on the street, people are not going to feel safe anyway,” she says.

“Eyes on the street” means both activity on the streets in terms of footfall and what’s going on in the buildings that line them. “Whether it’s commercial [properties] or not,” Ortiz says, “there should be transparency.” From inside you can see outside, and vice versa. After all, violence against women often happens behind closed doors. Affluent neighbourhoods can be the worst offenders in this respect, with high walls shielding homes so that the streets feel like a tunnel.

City streets are riddled with dark corners and obstacles that make perfect hiding places for potential attackers to hide. In Barcelona, says Ortiz, large recycling and rubbish containers, parking areas and overgrown vegetation can be tweaked or repositioned to reduce lurking spots. The collective recommends vegetation is no higher than one metre, so you can see behind it, and that trees are maintained so as not to block lighting. Corners, stairs, alleyways, porches and other built aspects are harder to tackle retrospectively, but in San Sebastián on the north coast, says Ortiz, “they have recently approved a bylaw to ensure all the entrances to new housing buildings are on street level and avoid creating hiding places.”

Waiting alone at a bus stop displaying a sexist advertisement can feel like a hostile environment

And on occasions where creepy old developments are to be rebuilt, the collective is ready to make sure they become spaces for all ages and genders. One such project was the redevelopment of Plaça de la Llibertat in a municipality close to Barcelona, which was built, says Ortiz, “in the 60s or 70s when the trend was to make different levels and stairs and walls. It was a square women used to avoid.” Local women were consulted on the redevelopment, she says, “and now it’s more open, and a variety of people use the square during the day and cross it during the night.” It is more pram-friendly, too.

Another key aspect, says Ortiz, is how women are represented in the streets. Waiting alone at a bus stop displaying a sexist advertisement can feel like a hostile environment rather than a place of respect for women. To combat this, across Spain there have been pushes to name streets after women or female-associated professions. Murals or public art, especially feminist works remembering the contribution of women, are encouraged. And Barcelona, says Ortiz, “has a campaign against gender violence that’s really visible in public spaces.”

Nairobi, Kenya: female empowerment and self-defence

You can’t erase the threat of violence against women through city planning alone, especially in Nairobi, where, according to Amnesty International, more than half of residents live in informal communities. In these poorly serviced, cheek-by-jowl settlements, one in four girls are raped every year, according to the rape prevention organisation No Means No Worldwide. Its self-defence programme teaches girls how to identify a risk early on and attempt to stop it in its tracks; for those situations when “no” is not respected, they learn physical skills to defend themselves and get away. Boys, meanwhile, are taught to challenge rape myths, seek consent and to recognise when women are in danger and stand up for them.

A study of adolescent girls in one of these settlements, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, found that a 12-hour No Means No programme more than halved incidences of sexual assault – a statistic that has been replicated across the programme’s reach. Ten months after completing the course, more than half of female participants reported that they had used their new skills to avert sexual assault.

Three-quarters of boys trained by No Means No have successfully intervened in a violent or sexual assault on a woman. And there has been a 46% decrease in school dropouts due to teen pregnancy where the programme is active.

Cairo, Egypt: exposing the extent of sexual harassment

In May, the Cairo-based actor and former activist Amal Fathy complained publicly about being sexually harassed on a visit to her bank. She uploaded a video detailing the event saying the government was failing to protect women, only to be promptly arrested. In September Fathy, a mother of a young child, was sentenced to two years in prison for possessing indecent material and spreading “false news”. She was also fined for making public insults.

In a 2017 Thomson Reuters Foundation poll, Cairo was found to be “the most dangerous megacity in the world for women”. A UN survey in 2013 found that 99.3% of Egyptian women had experienced sexual harassment, but official figures last year claimed less than 10% of women were affected.

It was this climate of fear and denial that spawned HarassMap. Like SafetiPin, it crowdsources data from its users, only instead of safety ratings, it is for logging sexual harassment and violence. When a user reports an incident, they receive an automated response with advice and contacts to help get support and justice.

The aim is to make plain the scale of the epidemic, show that it affects all women and it is not their fault, and reveal where harassment occurs (mostly in the streets and on public transport). Since the launch of HarassMap in 2010, sexual harassment has finally been recognised as a crime in Egypt, and the HarassMap concept has been replicated in 80 other countries, including Greece, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.

In Cairo, women have felt emboldened to report more publicly on social media instead of the map. The #FirstTimeIWasHarassed hashtag launched last year, for instance, has allowed the HarassMap team to collate almost 2,000 testimonies of child sexual violence.

Kigali, Rwanda: creating safe workspaces

According to the World Economic Forum, Rwanda is the fourth best country in the world for gender equality, streets ahead of Britain and France. In 2017 the UN said it was one of only two countries in the world with as many women as men in government (the other was Bolivia).

But that doesn’t mean that life isn’t tough and dangerous for the estimated 5,000 female street hawkers in the country’s capital. So over the past four years, 16 safe mini-markets have been built to provide secure, organised workplaces for these women, complete with breastfeeding areas.

'Paying to stay safe': why women don't walk as much as men Read more

Not only have the markets made their work safer, but operating from an organised market also helps the women earn better livings. And it is well established that improving economic status is the best protection against harassment and violence the world over. Additionally, says Emma Carine Uwantege of UN Women’s Rwanda office, Kigali “is supporting vulnerable women, especially street vendors, to organise into cooperatives and boost their businesses”.

Transport, too, is being improved. “The city has been able to install CCTV cameras in some buses with voice alerts on sexual harassment and gender based violence,” she says. “There are also posters on ending sexual harassment and reporting of the crime.”

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