An IT employee was assaulted on her way back home from work last week. As always in the aftermath on these incidents, forums are rife with conversations about women’s safety. Work timings of IT companies, their compliance with the laws, non-provision of dependable cab services and security to employees steal some of the pie, but the largest portion is reserved for one question, “Is the city safe for women?”
While such a question does well for the TRP ratings of a prime time TV show, it’s important to note that the outcome of this debate will be to reduce Delhi as the ‘rape capital of India’. No, it’s not because any other city in this country is better or worse, but simply because the answer to such a question remains not in a yes or no binary, but deep inside shades of grey. Reports of violence in public places usually trigger this question, but when home and workplace constitute most of a city, how does one measure the ‘city’s safeness’ when we know not of what goes on in these private spheres? As we do not, it would be incorrect to call any city a ‘safe city’.
Once this line of questioning which reveals that a city is unsafe because its public spaces and roads are not has been exhausted we usually move on to the demands. As this list has been around forever, one need not be a rocket scientist or Jane Jacobs in disguise to know what we need to make a city’s streets safer. The Safetipin App enables users to view the safety of a place depending on the ranking given to it by others, thereby creating a crowd-sourced safety map of cities. The parameters used by the app for the safety score are pretty much the demands made of the government after incidents of violence. These include Lighting, Openess, Visibility, People Density, Security, Walk Path, Transportation and Gender Diversity in the area.
While street lighting, security, and each of the other parameters are important features to have to make a city safe for its people, it is essential now to include ‘culture’ on the list of demands. A city can be safe only when its culture can be safe, and the culture of safety is only what the people of the city and its government cultivate. Now more than ever, and having seen how lethargic change can be, we need to push for culture that is gender sensitive — gender not just inside and outside work places, but one that felicitates social interaction, changes its perception of working women and builds women’s mobility.
What we need is systems that encourage bystander action instead of dissuading them from aiding safety, officers devoid of stereotypes that enable victims to report crimes, and laws that will not shame the victim into hiding. To be a truly safe city, we as its citizens need to look out for each other at all times – upping the game of ‘being Bystanders’. To quote Jane Jacobs, we have to be the ‘eyes on the street’ and create a culture in which “we don’t watch our neighbours — We see them. We make our community safer together.”
seker.archanaa@gmail.com
The writer is a city-based activist, in-your-face feminist and a media glutton