All women know the feeling of looking over their shoulder walking home, trying to avoid a threatening gaze on public transport, or holding their keys between their fingers for protection.
Violence and harassment in public spaces is everywhere, but together we can change this. UN Women UK is launching the Safe Spaces Now project to create freedom for women and girls – and we need you.
We can’t wait to welcome you to the hackathon on Saturday. This is an opportunity for us to come together to co-design a digital solution that will help UN Women UK reach as many women and girls as possible. Helping to prevent violence and harassment in public spaces, so women and girls are free from violence and free to be themselves.
We have a really diverse group of people coming along, from data scientists to campaigners. If you’d like to come already equipped with ideas, we would like you to bear these three objectives in mind:
1 The focus of the day is ending violence against women in public spaces: across the spectrum from serious violence and abuse to harassment and catcalling.
2 We are looking for a tool that can be created and adapted by UN Women UK, to capture women and girls’ lived experiences. One of the biggest challenges to creating solutions that really work to prevent violence, is the lack of joined-up data on what women’s lived experience of safety really looks like.
As the first step of the Safe Spaces Now project, we are looking to reach a deep understanding of the reality of safety for women and girls. So we want to collect hard data and stories from as many people as possible, with a practical solution that will really work.
3 UN Women UK is a small charity with small funding and a small team – so we are particularly looking for smart solutions that could bring in a corporate funder, or reach large audiences organically. We’re looking for ideas that are inventive, understand how to hustle, and will make people want to share them with their friends!
Where it all began
UN Women has been working to create safe cities and public spaces worldwide since our birth as an organisation in 2010.
This video will give you a little background about how we have been delivering programmes with partners around the world, and some of the global methodology that we know works.
Now our challenge is at home. We can’t wait for you to be part of the journey to making the UK a safe, free space for women and girls.
For the bookworms among you, you can find some further background reading here:
An intro to our global framework working all over the world for safer spaces: click here
BBC article exploring the level of street harassment that affects women and girls in the UK: click here
A summary of YouGov research on sexual harassment: click here