Andrew Tate<\/a> continue to dominate corners of the internet and most women still instinctively perform the same nightly rituals.<\/p>\n\u201cThe list of daily actions taken by women and girls to survive is long and rooted in injustice\u201d<\/p>\n
Rebecca Goshawk<\/p>\n
\u201cTaking the long route home, never wearing headphones after dark, texting friends to say they\u2019re safe \u2014 the list of daily actions taken by women and girls to survive is long and rooted in injustice,\u201d says Rebecca Goshawk of Solace Women\u2019s Aid. Jamie Klingler, co-founder of Reclaim These Streets, is a little more blunt. \u201cA better app would be one to identify predatory and violent men and police officers.\u201d <\/p>\n
What about the perpetrators?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to argue with Goshawk or Klingler. Sure, it\u2019s great to have new tools to help us get home safely, but what about the root cause of the problem: the perpetrators? Doesn\u2019t this just put the onus on the victim? \u201cA shameful and damning indictment of the state of London in 2026\u201d, \u201ctreating the symptom rather than the cause\u201d and \u201chow about an app that continually reminds men not to rape people?\u201d are among the comments I\u2019ve seen from sceptics since Safest Way was announced.<\/p>\n
And yet, the uncomfortable truth is that many of us already modify our behaviour every day. Co-founders Alesja Gilvear and Ilya Ilyankou \u2014 a product manager and a geospatial researcher \u2014 are keenly aware of the criticism, but their motivations are well-meaning and they have clearly spent a long time thinking about how women move through cities. <\/p>\n
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Safest Way<\/p>\n
Street crime professors from UCL and King\u2019s and a retired Google executive are among their team of advisers. The technology is rooted in research, combining multiple sources of public information. Roads with a lamp-post every 30 metres are classified as fully lit. According to the app\u2019s data, the most well-lit borough is the City of London, at 86 per cent fully lit, followed by Hackney at 77 per cent. <\/p>\n
Bottom of the list is Harrow, with only 16 per cent of roads fully lit, and I am surprised to discover my new borough of Richmond also scores relatively poorly \u2014 largely because of its vast green spaces and residential streets. My walk home from the station scores 6\/10 on the app\u2019s safety scale, three points lower than my old route in Clapham, close to where Everard was abducted. Was I wrong to feel so safe here? <\/p>\n
That, perhaps, is the app\u2019s biggest complication. Everard was not kidnapped from an unlit alleyway or deserted park, but from a busy, well-lit road. No app can fully account for human behaviour, randomness or predatory violence \u2014 and Ilyankou is careful not to overpromise on this. Safest Way, he says, is not designed to guarantee safety, only to provide more information. \u201cThe data already exists,\u201d he tells me. \u201cWe\u2019re just giving people access to it so they can make more informed decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople should stop attacking women. But in the meantime, let\u2019s do what we can to keep ourselves safe\u201d<\/p>\n
Jackie Childs<\/p>\n
That notion of information as empowerment is ultimately the app\u2019s strongest defence. One of Safest Way\u2019s early beta testers, yoga instructor Jackie Childs from Wimbledon, compares it to changing your route because of football crowds or traffic. \u201cPeople should stop attacking women,\u201d she says. \u201cBut in the meantime, let\u2019s do what we can to keep ourselves safe\u2026 People need to stop breaking into houses, too \u2014 but that doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019m not going to lock my front door.\u201d<\/p>\n
Childs\u2019s words ring in my head long after I close the app. Safest Way has become her navigation app of choice, but she still chose to walk through a housing estate en route to an afternoon appointment the other day \u2014 just as I\u2019m still choosing to take an alley to Tesco during the day because I like the wisteria.<\/p>\n
What I will do now, however, is have Safest Way in my arsenal whenever I find myself navigating somewhere new \u2014 especially at night. The app will not solve violence against women. But I also know there will be situations where I don\u2019t have local knowledge to rely on: leaving a friend\u2019s flat in an unfamiliar postcode; walking back from a new gym class late at night. A little navy logo on my screen won\u2019t necessarily make me feel safer. But it might make me feel slightly less in the dark.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s 10pm on a Friday and I\u2019m deliberately avoiding the main road on my walk home from the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1025603,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7757],"tags":[748,18599,393,4884,257,5549,16,15,1292],"class_list":["post-1025602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-london","tag-britain","tag-cctv","tag-england","tag-great-britain","tag-london","tag-safety","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-women"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116747179578723543","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1025602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1025602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1025602\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1025603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1025602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1025602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1025602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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