Women’s Safety at the ISF

Women’s Safety at India Social Forum 2006

JAGORI conducted a workshop on the Safe Delhi Campaign at the recently concluded India Social Forum (ISF) in Delhi. The session was well attended by over 150 men and women from around the country.

The presentation began with Kalpana Viswanath introducing the campaign and its genesis. All survey and statistics about Delhi reinforce the extent of crimes against women and the lack of safety in the city. The aim of this campaign is to get more sets of people in the city involved in the issue, as safety of women is not a “women’s issue”. Rather it is an issue that everyone should be concerned about.

Surabhi Mehrotra presented the research on safety audits that have been conducted by JAGORI around the city over the past year. Safety audits have been conducted in residential areas, commercial spaces, University, etc in order to assess the factors that make a space safe for women and girls.

Surabhi, shared the process of conducting the audits as well as the findings. During a safety audit, women walk through a space and record their responses to questions such as:

• When do you feel uncomfortable in a place
• Have you heard or experienced anything negative here
• Would anyone be able to hear if you called for help
• Would people help if you were in need
• What kind of changes would make you feel safer
• Who do you think can play a role in addressing safety

The audits helped us understand that safety was determined by both-issues of infrastructure and the attitudes and behaviour of people in the space. We found that the following infrastructural issues made a difference to how safe an area was.

• Lighting. The better lit a space is, the safer it feels
• State of pavements. Unclean, broken, pavements with overgrown trees/vehicles parked on them are unusable
• Presence of hawkers/shopkeepers. This we observed makes spaces such as subways and lanes safer for women
• Male dominated spaces such as liquor shops, taxi stands, paan/cigarette shops were seen as unsafe.

These audits helped us to map the city in order to show which factors make areas safe. One of the main factors identified was lighting – public spaces became largely unsafe for women once it turned dark.

The aim of the campaign has been to launch concrete initiatives based on our study, to make the city safer and to involve more people. Shrutipriya shared some of these initiatives. These can be broadly classified u der the following heads:

• Awareness Building Initiatives. These include both campaigns targeting specific communities as well mass media campaigns
• Educating and Capacity Building
• Creating Partnerships

We shared our unique partnership with Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) for three initiatives.

• Gender sensitization workshops with transport staff
• Improve public lighting
• Self defense training for women in corporates

  This was followed by a lively discussion on different aspects of violence. Members of the audience shared their work on violence and linked it to the Safe City Campaign.