Organisation:
Red Dot Foundation
Location:
Mumbai, Maharashtra
Problem:
Women face violence in many forms at in all kinds of environments every day. Most women fear reporting crimes committed against them. As a result, behavior change becomes that much harder to manifest within society and it makes it more difficult for authorities to tackle the issue as well.
Solution:
Safecity is a platform that crowd sources personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. This data which may be anonymous gets aggregated as hot spots on a map indicating trends at a local level. The idea is to make this data useful for individuals, local communities and local administration to identify factors that cause behaviour that leads to violence and work on strategies for solutions.
Safecity aims to make cities safer by encouraging equal access to public spaces for everyone especially women, through the use of crowd sourced data, community engagement and institutional accountability.
Scalability and Impact:
Our main target audience is women/girls who are victims of sexual harassment due to a patriarchal culture. We are creating a new data set which currently does not exist. Perception of the police’s insensitivity as well as cultural backlash deters people from reporting. They feel more comfortable using our platform and this is seen by reports from over 20 years ago. By representing the information thus collected on a map as hotspots, we are moving the focus away from the “victim” to the location and people can view the issue with a different lens.
Our Impact: Police in Mumbai changed their beat patrol timings and increased vigilance. Municipal authorities and elected representatives in Delhi assured the community that clean toilets would be made available. Transportation authorities issued “women only” bus licenses in Kathmandu. Police in Mumbai, Delhi, Goa and Pune are accepting monthly trend reports of Safecity data. We integrated our child sexual abuse awareness program into the Delhi police‟s Parivartan school program. Over 9000 people have attended our awareness workshops on sexual violence and „Know your legal rights‟ .We have been partnering with NGOs in 8 neighbourhoods in Delhi and 2 in Mumbai.
Financial Requirements:
Financial Requirement
Awards and Recognition:
We were featured in the Guardian, BBC, Tech Crunch, Tech in Asia, Fast Company, Gizmodo amongst others. We have spoken at TEDx MidAtlantic, City Lab London, Aspen Ideas Festival and many other fora.
We have also received numerous awards from organisations such as the UN, Facebook, BMW, etc.