According to the report of the World Bank Research published in October 2022, 88% of women in India had been victims of sexual harassment, while only 1% of them reported it to the police.
In December 2012, a woman was gang-raped on a bus in the capital city. After many debates and creation of new policies, we still keep seeing such heinous crimes making headlines every day. In most cases, women are asked to produce evidence to sustain their accusations.
After this, Elsa Marie D’Silva founded the ‘Safecity’ application that allows women to document any such incident and other gender-based violence. In an exclusive interview with HerZindagi, she opened up about how the app is helping women come out and report such crimes.
The aim was to create a safe space where survivors can report incidences of sexual harassment without getting shamed. She added, “It helps build the confidence of survivors to break their silence, makes various incidents at the neighbourhood level visible and understands the patterns and trends emerging in the vicinity.”
Thus, the accumulated data can be used by various organisations to track crimes and ensure the safety of women and violence against them.
She claimed that the application is the largest crowd map in the world with over 50,000 stories collected from one million citizens. “It is being used in local communities by over 25 non-profits organisations in India and 17 countries through partner Safecity chapters,” she added. The application has trained over 35,000 youth to be campus ambassadors and has been partnering with 500 education institutions to begin on-campus safety programmes.
We asked her a few questions, and here is what she said.
What Led You To Create The Application?
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I have been a victim of stalking and groping in public transports and spaces, witnessed masturbation in public, seen perpetrators exposing indecently and survived sexual harassment in the workplace.
Many of my friends also have similar experiences. Yet none of us dared to file a complaint. In a way, we were contributing to a culture of silence, where these kinds of incidents are normalised and have become part of our daily routine.
Globally (according to the UN) one in three women around the world experience some form of sexual violence at least once in their lifetime, but 80% or more choose not to report it. The UN Secretary-General has called this a global epidemic.
Hence, I founded ‘Safecity’.
How Does The Application Work And Help Women?
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Safecity is a global platform trying to bridge the data gap between actual and reported cases of violence and sexual harassment. It encourages people to document their experiences, which is the first step in breaking the silence.
Their report becomes a part of a larger database that offers insights into patterns and trends of violence at the hyperlocal level. The experiences are pinned on a map which can be filtered by location, category, day of week and time of the day. It has played a pivotal role in building situational awareness at the individual and community levels.
Often survivors are made to believe that they are alone in the fight or victim shaming makes them feel they were the reason behind the incident. However, I feel it is the responsibility of society to provide a safe space for all to live, work and thrive. This dataset is collected on the application and actionable data which can be used by the individual with their community to drive institutional accountability with their service providers like police, civic authorities and transport providers.
We also try to provide legal information to survivors based on what they are reporting and their location, so that they can use the formal systems available nearby at their discretion.
In many places, community-based organisations have used the data to get the police to change patrol timings or increase vigilance, get more budgets for safety from their elected representatives, and create more awareness among elders and religious leaders. It has helped authorities create better policies for reporting and prevention of violence within institutions.
Many girls have negotiated with parents to return to school and have advocated for their collective safety. Data and information collected on the application have become the starting point for a dialogue on a taboo topic that needs open discussion.
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How Does The Application Disseminate Information To Various Organisations?
Every story that is reported is read by a human before it gets published. Any personal information is removed, and we ensure that there is no naming, shaming or blaming.
The data is then available for anyone to use to prevent violence. In addition, we send the data dashboards to five police forces and several local non-profits in India and abroad who are using the application.
The data has also been used in several peer review research papers for a better understanding of gender-based violence. It has helped to divert economic resources to the issue and the impact of the violence on the lives of victims and survivors.
How Association With Non-Profit Organisations Helps With The Cause?
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I am a rotary peace fellow and very active in the rotary network on gender-based violence. There is a peace element to the work we do because we try to prevent such incidents from taking place.
We use the rotary peace model by Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) for the cause. We do a lot of awareness workshops with the club members. We believe that you need an ecosystem where all different organisations come forward to understand, work, collaborate and find solutions for issues like this.
My rotary peace fellows are also lawyers whom we engage with to spread awareness about the rights survivors have. There are also judges, for example, Justice Swati Chouhan, who has written a book for children to help them identify human trafficking.
We have worked with rotary club members who have trained us as safety champions in their communities where they are not only collecting the data but also analysing the patterns and trends, auditing the physical locations and making recommendations.
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Members like Dharmendra Sharma, president of the rotary club of Bombay West, have given us the space to host our events. I have spoken at international gatherings as well to help club members understand how they should be allies and changemakers to end gender-based violence.
We are looking forward to more institutional partnerships with police, mayors, civic governments and transport officials. We have the data that they do not often receive but is very insightful and can be used for better decision-making, deployment of resources and effective implementation of policies.
If you liked this story, stay tuned for more.
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