Do women actually feel safer using the StreetSafe tool the government fully launched a few months ago?

TW: murder

According to police figures, almost 250,000 street attacks, mainly on women, took place across England and Wales in the 12 months after the murder of Sarah Everard, and at least 125 women have been murdered in that same time period. Many of these women’s faces never make the news, but there a handful whose cases become high profile, including that of Zara Aleena – a 25-year-old, who was murdered on Sunday 26 June while she was walking home in East London – and Hina Bashir – who was working part-time as a security guard at Queen Mary University while studying business and was reported missed after she didn’t arrive at work on Thursday 14 July. 

In the wake of each of this cases, an outcry can be seen and heard, across social media and beyond, asking for more to be done to protect the safety of women. “We just want to walk home in peace,” one Twitter user wrote after Wayne Couzens, a police officer, was found guilty of her rape and murder, while another asked: “What has to happen for the safety of women to be at the forefront of the agenda?”

As part of a response to outcry, and in a bid to help women – and their families – feel safer, the Government Home Office launched the StreetSafe tool, as well as backing various other safety apps, including Path Community, a free app that encourages crowdsourced safe routes home by allowing users to flag potentially unsafe and unlit sections of streets, underneath bridges. The Street safe tool allows women to anonymously flag up areas where they feel unsafe. Developers of the tool say that certain areas can feel unsafe due to environmental issues, like poor lighting, abandoned buildings, vandalism, or behaviours, such as being followed or verbally abused. These factors may enable offenders to either commit or conceal a crime and so, in theory, highlighting these ‘zones’ on a shared mapping app might help women to make more informed choices about their route. Although, let’s be clear, the onus of safety should never fall on a woman herself, no one is doing anything ‘wrong’ by taking the fastest route home at night or walking through dimly-lit areas. 

So, the big question is, has the tool actually made women feel safer? Well, among those we asked, it wasn’t particularly clear-cut. 

Lots of women hadn’t even heard of the tool, or the Community Path app. Several said that they would look into using it now they were aware of its existence but were perplexed that more hadn’t been made of its development in order to alert as many women as possible. “I’ve literally never heard of it,” Aisha F told me. “I actually did download a sort of panic button app and various other things after the news of Zara [Aleena], but I don’t even remember that coming up.”

Marie Mantan felt more positively about the tool. “It’s helped me feel more proactive about my own safety, and I often send the link to the reporting tool to friends or people on Twitter to encourage them to report areas where they’ve mentioned they feel unsafe.