Nothing shocking about that. Just incredibly disappointing.
Curious to see a graph of how safe people feel vs actual crime stats. Guarantee to see there be a divergence as soon as social media comes in. London is pretty safe but everyone talks about it as if its 1970s Glasgow
How is it a “Shock” and also claims to align with the views of half of women?
It’s not a shock, because people don’t feel safe here and everybody knows that.
This is what happens when you cut police back to basically nothing, don’t have enough space for prisoners so give pathetic sentences to anybody who we do catch, and have basically no social services or mental health care in a city for a decade or so, just to antagonise everything further.
Then add in the rise of misogynists on social media and suddenly women don’t feel safe on the streets. What a shock.
/Rant
Well given that they can’t even trust police officers now it’s hardly surprising. Very sad state of affairs
Im no woman, but I never feel safe in this city.
How is that shocking?
On the average walk to work, you will see posters saying not to have your phone out cause it will get stolen. If you go down to your local Tesco or Greggs, it is common you see people freely stealing and staff doing nothing cause they have been told to do so. When was the last time time you took the tube during rush hour and did not see people squeeze through the barriers and no one bats an eye.
The average Londoner literally experience crime everyday and you wonder why women don’t feel safe.
In a shock to absolutely no one. Just me and my deep heat attached to my hand all day.
Not at the moment and for lots of reasons. Obviously there are the standard “is this guy gonna rape me” fears and so on. But for me number one is e-bikes and Lime and Forest bikes. I am terrified I am going to be taken out on the pavement by some idiot racing along whilst staring at their phones.
I have started to avoid Oxford street for this reason. Its straight up unsafe. I was in Oxford street last Friday evening. Never again. Cyclists on the pavement at top speed weaving in and out of pedestrians. Food delivery drivers are a particular menace around where I live and again, I avoid the local high street in the evenings and during rush hour.
I lived in London when the IRA was bombing daily, I lived through ISIS and Al Qaeda and was here during lockdown. it is the Lime and Forest bikes that make me feel unsafe and are preventing me from doing things I love, namely walking along the river, walking through parks, walking through the West End and admiring the glorious views of Regent Street.
Feeling unsafe =/= being unsafe. Plenty of media hyperbole & propaganda has lead to people being substantially more fearful than they need be.
That being said, there are some legitimate issues with crime reporting & police response.
The graph in the article shows that 49% felt unsafe at some level. The “journalist” then added the 6% of “Don’t know” to make the headline. It’s still a high figure but the claim is technically inaccurate
It’s bit shocking this news article doesn’t provide any statistics to compare the perception with.
I guess the perception is the important bit because it’s what’s used to win elections. And that’s the only thing that matters.
Not particularly shocking I must say.
Personally I navigate the city, many many parts of it, all the time and do not usually go around feeling anxious or unsafe.
This is primarily down to not wanting to live in fear all the time, and statistically speaking having a fairly decent chance of most of my journeys being perfectly fine.
But I do move around the city with the knowledge that it is not always a safe place to be, and as such I take precautions and, as much as possible, try to use routes I know, along which I know where I could go to get help if I need it. I also bring items with me which could be used for self defence if necessary, I avoid travelling very late whenever possible, and never allow my phone battery to run too low.
I wouldn’t be doing any of those things if I knew it was a safe city, but doing those things means I can at least go about my business without constantly being on edge.
Sad that it’s necessary, though.
And as someone who isn’t conventionally attractive, I probably get a tenth of the harassment of everyone else, so I guess I can count myself lucky in that sense.
Don’t think it’s a shock but I don’t think it’s a London specific issue
What on Earth do people expect to happen when our justice system gives such pathetic sentences for violent crime?
The only thing shocking about that number is that it’s so low. Only 50%? Would think it’s closer to 90
“study finds just one in 20 girls and young women across the UK feel safe in public spaces”
“Just one in 20 girls and young women feel completely safe in public spaces across the country and North East Lincolnshire is the toughest place in the UK to be a girl, according to new research from Plan International UK.
Blackpool, Barrow-in-Furness (now Westmorland and Furness), Rochdale and Knowsley – all in the North West of England – made up the rest of the top five toughest places”
shock? in other news, fork found in kitchen..
If this news is a ‘shock’ then maybe they should talk to more women.
This is not just affecting London, but the whole country.
I don’t disagree with the findings but this is a very poorly phrased poll. For example, they asked “have you experienced any of the following things from a man in London.” A better question would be to time bound it (e.g. in the last 5 years) and/or specifiy that it is on the streets of london. You could answer yes to being verbally abused but it not be on the street, for example.
Now, I wholeheartedly believe these are an issue wherever you are but it would be helpful to differentiate so we can have a better idea of the scale of each problem and how it is changing over time. How you deal with people being verbally abused at work or home, is probably different from people being verbally abused by randoms on the street.
I also feel the concept of safety is incredibly vague and they should have also asked whether feeling less safe has changed your behaviours or not. For me personally, since the most recent information about the police came out, i do feel less safe. However, it hasn’t stopped me from going out or changed my behaviours because I was already taking as many precautions as possible to maintain my safety.
Long story short, this is a huge problem that should be taken seriously so it’s annoying that they wrote such a sloppy poll that basically says nothing we didn’t already know to create a dumb click bait article.
real research, real answers, real actions, please
Shocking to who exactly? My female friends are very open and have spoken many times about how, in the last couple of years, they feel increasingly less safe and more uncomfortable going out and about in London.
They’ve also accepted that Mayor and powers that be will do nothing about it, so it’s on them (my friends) to change their habits or go out less.
And the elephant in the room, that no one wants to seem to talk about, is that there has been an increased influx of people from cultures and countries where the values and behaviours towards women just don’t align with ours. My friends experiences, and news stories in the last few years highlight this.
I’m a second gen immigrant myself, but we have to accept and have a conversation about the fact that we can’t have people on our streets who aren’t willing to integrate and subscribe to British/western values and behaviours.
[removed]
Absolutely insane that people are collating women’s safety with the lack of violent policing on the streets, shoplifting, and other shit like that. Women are unsafe because we live in a horrible patriarchal society that encourages men to act with unfiltered violence towards women. The police and justice system will never help with that, because they are part of the same system – just look at the dismissal of sexual harassment cases. The people encouraging violent policing are aware it would make this worse, and actively want that.
I definitely have felt less safe here than I used to. It feels like there’s been a rise in men going out of their way to harass you or make you feel uncomfortable. A few weeks ago a man deliberately stepped in front of me along TCR and kept moving to obstruct my path until I was pushed into the road. He was so uncomfortably close to me I could feel him breathing on my face. Apparently there’s a trend of men deliberately pushing women in the street, and lots of women have reported men deliberately spitting on them when they’re out running.
There have been a couple of instances where I’ve been really scared. Once when a drunken football fan harassed me on a train, threatening to rape me at one point, and didn’t even stop when his teenage son was crying and saying ‘please dad stop’. It was a packed carriage and the only person who said anything was a woman a similar age to me. I reported it to the police who closed the case after ‘getting CCTV from the wrong carriage’. The other instance was when I was waiting for a bus at about ten pm and a drunk/mentally ill man started screaming at me that he was going to slit my throat. Also reported that to the police and their response was to come to my house at 7am three days later for no clear reason, and then never contact me again.
I think the police response gas played a big part in me feeling unsafe. Every interaction I’ve had with them they’ve come across unfriendly and inconvenienced. A few years ago I stopped a policeman in the street to ask if he’d help with a homeless woman I’d met who had a large infected wound, and he said ‘what do you want me to do about it?’ There was also a period last year where I’d read the Hackney Gazette and pretty much every week there would be a story about a police officer charged with rape, or assault, or sacked for harassment, or found to have sent misogynist WhatsApp messages etc.
I don’t know if it has gotten less safe for women in London, but people’s attitudes have changed and they’re more brazen about harassment, particularly verbal harassment. It also seems to be a lot more teenage boys which is honestly quite humiliating.
Half of the population doesn’t feel safe regardless of gender
Okay now do a poll for men
I mean depends where and when, but I also don’t feel safe in any city on the planet alone. Or small town. In fact small towns are sort of worse. London has bars open, people on buses and streets, I can order an uber in an emergency.
In a small town town everyone is asleep…
I wonder how many of those women feel safe anywhere in public. How does this compare to women in other big cities? And I wonder how many men feel safe on the streets of London. It’s not a particularly insightful statistic in complete isolation.
I’m not questioning the statistics as much as wishing there was a bit more info for comparison.
This is not a ‘shock’. It’s literally how most people (male/female) feel
The poll should be asking men the same questions so there is a frame of reference. That way we can understand to what extent this is a gender issue.
It should also be including actual crime statistics as a point of reference to help us understand to what extent a feeling of less safety corresponds to actual increases in crime. People may have felt safer in London in, say, the 70s, and crime rates may have been higher but there was less publicity for crimes (i.e. no social media).
It’s useful to understand the attitudes that people, women in particular, have in regards to their own safety, but simply using that to say as the platform to tackle violence against women isn’t going to get us anywhere without the context of actual crime statistics. We also need a male control group to frame the data against, though that part would likely just confirm what we already believe about women feeling less safe than men generally.
Whoever wrote “shock” doesn’t live in the same London I do – lack of police and no consequences for most crimes is only going to go in one direction
Why do we as a society continue to normalise this? Why is it acceptable?
Do women feel safe on any city street, in any country? I certainly wouldn’t.
Tbf, more than half of women don’t feel safe anywhere
“Shock” to who?
shock?
I feel like the only people who feel safe in London are the people who are making other people feel unsafe.
London was worse in the 1980s and 1990s, but at least there were more police around and people in general looked out for each other more. I feel now like it’s getting back to being as bad as back then, but half the police stations are gone, and people will walk over your dead body.
37 comments
Nothing shocking about that. Just incredibly disappointing.
Curious to see a graph of how safe people feel vs actual crime stats. Guarantee to see there be a divergence as soon as social media comes in. London is pretty safe but everyone talks about it as if its 1970s Glasgow
How is it a “Shock” and also claims to align with the views of half of women?
It’s not a shock, because people don’t feel safe here and everybody knows that.
This is what happens when you cut police back to basically nothing, don’t have enough space for prisoners so give pathetic sentences to anybody who we do catch, and have basically no social services or mental health care in a city for a decade or so, just to antagonise everything further.
Then add in the rise of misogynists on social media and suddenly women don’t feel safe on the streets. What a shock.
/Rant
Well given that they can’t even trust police officers now it’s hardly surprising. Very sad state of affairs
Im no woman, but I never feel safe in this city.
How is that shocking?
On the average walk to work, you will see posters saying not to have your phone out cause it will get stolen. If you go down to your local Tesco or Greggs, it is common you see people freely stealing and staff doing nothing cause they have been told to do so. When was the last time time you took the tube during rush hour and did not see people squeeze through the barriers and no one bats an eye.
The average Londoner literally experience crime everyday and you wonder why women don’t feel safe.
In a shock to absolutely no one. Just me and my deep heat attached to my hand all day.
Not at the moment and for lots of reasons. Obviously there are the standard “is this guy gonna rape me” fears and so on. But for me number one is e-bikes and Lime and Forest bikes. I am terrified I am going to be taken out on the pavement by some idiot racing along whilst staring at their phones.
I have started to avoid Oxford street for this reason. Its straight up unsafe. I was in Oxford street last Friday evening. Never again. Cyclists on the pavement at top speed weaving in and out of pedestrians. Food delivery drivers are a particular menace around where I live and again, I avoid the local high street in the evenings and during rush hour.
I lived in London when the IRA was bombing daily, I lived through ISIS and Al Qaeda and was here during lockdown. it is the Lime and Forest bikes that make me feel unsafe and are preventing me from doing things I love, namely walking along the river, walking through parks, walking through the West End and admiring the glorious views of Regent Street.
Feeling unsafe =/= being unsafe. Plenty of media hyperbole & propaganda has lead to people being substantially more fearful than they need be.
That being said, there are some legitimate issues with crime reporting & police response.
The graph in the article shows that 49% felt unsafe at some level. The “journalist” then added the 6% of “Don’t know” to make the headline. It’s still a high figure but the claim is technically inaccurate
It’s bit shocking this news article doesn’t provide any statistics to compare the perception with.
I guess the perception is the important bit because it’s what’s used to win elections. And that’s the only thing that matters.
Not particularly shocking I must say.
Personally I navigate the city, many many parts of it, all the time and do not usually go around feeling anxious or unsafe.
This is primarily down to not wanting to live in fear all the time, and statistically speaking having a fairly decent chance of most of my journeys being perfectly fine.
But I do move around the city with the knowledge that it is not always a safe place to be, and as such I take precautions and, as much as possible, try to use routes I know, along which I know where I could go to get help if I need it. I also bring items with me which could be used for self defence if necessary, I avoid travelling very late whenever possible, and never allow my phone battery to run too low.
I wouldn’t be doing any of those things if I knew it was a safe city, but doing those things means I can at least go about my business without constantly being on edge.
Sad that it’s necessary, though.
And as someone who isn’t conventionally attractive, I probably get a tenth of the harassment of everyone else, so I guess I can count myself lucky in that sense.
Don’t think it’s a shock but I don’t think it’s a London specific issue
What on Earth do people expect to happen when our justice system gives such pathetic sentences for violent crime?
The only thing shocking about that number is that it’s so low. Only 50%? Would think it’s closer to 90
This is not a London-specific issue
https://news.stv.tv/world/most-girls-and-young-women-do-not-feel-safe-in-public-spaces-uk-study-finds
“study finds just one in 20 girls and young women across the UK feel safe in public spaces”
“Just one in 20 girls and young women feel completely safe in public spaces across the country and North East Lincolnshire is the toughest place in the UK to be a girl, according to new research from Plan International UK.
Blackpool, Barrow-in-Furness (now Westmorland and Furness), Rochdale and Knowsley – all in the North West of England – made up the rest of the top five toughest places”
shock? in other news, fork found in kitchen..
If this news is a ‘shock’ then maybe they should talk to more women.
This is not just affecting London, but the whole country.
https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/41407-how-often-do-british-women-feel-unsafe-doing-day-d
Even in Scotland, it’s 50%
I don’t disagree with the findings but this is a very poorly phrased poll. For example, they asked “have you experienced any of the following things from a man in London.” A better question would be to time bound it (e.g. in the last 5 years) and/or specifiy that it is on the streets of london. You could answer yes to being verbally abused but it not be on the street, for example.
Now, I wholeheartedly believe these are an issue wherever you are but it would be helpful to differentiate so we can have a better idea of the scale of each problem and how it is changing over time. How you deal with people being verbally abused at work or home, is probably different from people being verbally abused by randoms on the street.
I also feel the concept of safety is incredibly vague and they should have also asked whether feeling less safe has changed your behaviours or not. For me personally, since the most recent information about the police came out, i do feel less safe. However, it hasn’t stopped me from going out or changed my behaviours because I was already taking as many precautions as possible to maintain my safety.
Long story short, this is a huge problem that should be taken seriously so it’s annoying that they wrote such a sloppy poll that basically says nothing we didn’t already know to create a dumb click bait article.
real research, real answers, real actions, please
Shocking to who exactly? My female friends are very open and have spoken many times about how, in the last couple of years, they feel increasingly less safe and more uncomfortable going out and about in London.
They’ve also accepted that Mayor and powers that be will do nothing about it, so it’s on them (my friends) to change their habits or go out less.
And the elephant in the room, that no one wants to seem to talk about, is that there has been an increased influx of people from cultures and countries where the values and behaviours towards women just don’t align with ours. My friends experiences, and news stories in the last few years highlight this.
I’m a second gen immigrant myself, but we have to accept and have a conversation about the fact that we can’t have people on our streets who aren’t willing to integrate and subscribe to British/western values and behaviours.
[removed]
Absolutely insane that people are collating women’s safety with the lack of violent policing on the streets, shoplifting, and other shit like that. Women are unsafe because we live in a horrible patriarchal society that encourages men to act with unfiltered violence towards women. The police and justice system will never help with that, because they are part of the same system – just look at the dismissal of sexual harassment cases. The people encouraging violent policing are aware it would make this worse, and actively want that.
I definitely have felt less safe here than I used to. It feels like there’s been a rise in men going out of their way to harass you or make you feel uncomfortable. A few weeks ago a man deliberately stepped in front of me along TCR and kept moving to obstruct my path until I was pushed into the road. He was so uncomfortably close to me I could feel him breathing on my face. Apparently there’s a trend of men deliberately pushing women in the street, and lots of women have reported men deliberately spitting on them when they’re out running.
There have been a couple of instances where I’ve been really scared. Once when a drunken football fan harassed me on a train, threatening to rape me at one point, and didn’t even stop when his teenage son was crying and saying ‘please dad stop’. It was a packed carriage and the only person who said anything was a woman a similar age to me. I reported it to the police who closed the case after ‘getting CCTV from the wrong carriage’. The other instance was when I was waiting for a bus at about ten pm and a drunk/mentally ill man started screaming at me that he was going to slit my throat. Also reported that to the police and their response was to come to my house at 7am three days later for no clear reason, and then never contact me again.
I think the police response gas played a big part in me feeling unsafe. Every interaction I’ve had with them they’ve come across unfriendly and inconvenienced. A few years ago I stopped a policeman in the street to ask if he’d help with a homeless woman I’d met who had a large infected wound, and he said ‘what do you want me to do about it?’ There was also a period last year where I’d read the Hackney Gazette and pretty much every week there would be a story about a police officer charged with rape, or assault, or sacked for harassment, or found to have sent misogynist WhatsApp messages etc.
I don’t know if it has gotten less safe for women in London, but people’s attitudes have changed and they’re more brazen about harassment, particularly verbal harassment. It also seems to be a lot more teenage boys which is honestly quite humiliating.
Half of the population doesn’t feel safe regardless of gender
Okay now do a poll for men
I mean depends where and when, but I also don’t feel safe in any city on the planet alone. Or small town. In fact small towns are sort of worse. London has bars open, people on buses and streets, I can order an uber in an emergency.
In a small town town everyone is asleep…
I wonder how many of those women feel safe anywhere in public. How does this compare to women in other big cities? And I wonder how many men feel safe on the streets of London. It’s not a particularly insightful statistic in complete isolation.
I’m not questioning the statistics as much as wishing there was a bit more info for comparison.
This is not a ‘shock’. It’s literally how most people (male/female) feel
The poll should be asking men the same questions so there is a frame of reference. That way we can understand to what extent this is a gender issue.
It should also be including actual crime statistics as a point of reference to help us understand to what extent a feeling of less safety corresponds to actual increases in crime. People may have felt safer in London in, say, the 70s, and crime rates may have been higher but there was less publicity for crimes (i.e. no social media).
It’s useful to understand the attitudes that people, women in particular, have in regards to their own safety, but simply using that to say as the platform to tackle violence against women isn’t going to get us anywhere without the context of actual crime statistics. We also need a male control group to frame the data against, though that part would likely just confirm what we already believe about women feeling less safe than men generally.
Whoever wrote “shock” doesn’t live in the same London I do – lack of police and no consequences for most crimes is only going to go in one direction
Why do we as a society continue to normalise this? Why is it acceptable?
Do women feel safe on any city street, in any country? I certainly wouldn’t.
Tbf, more than half of women don’t feel safe anywhere
“Shock” to who?
shock?
I feel like the only people who feel safe in London are the people who are making other people feel unsafe.
London was worse in the 1980s and 1990s, but at least there were more police around and people in general looked out for each other more. I feel now like it’s getting back to being as bad as back then, but half the police stations are gone, and people will walk over your dead body.
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