Updated Jul 09, 2020
Elsamarie Dsilva
Sexual violence is a global pandemic which holds women and girls back from achieving their potential. There is lack of data regarding this issue because of the culture of silence. This makes the issue invisible and further promotes unconscious bias and stereotypes.
Safecity is a platform that crowdsources personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. This data which maybe 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 causes behaviour that leads to violence and work on strategies for solutions.
Our main target audience are women/girls who are victims of sexual harassment due to a patriarchal culture. We encourage them to share their stories, learn that they are not alone as "victims", feel empowered to stand up for themselves and confront the perpetrator.
Our main objective is to:
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. Today we make choices for pretty much everything based on reviews - books, movies, restaurants, hotels but we have nothing for personal safety.
Usually NGOs focus on solving individual cases and other apps are SOS apps. But we work on historical experiences to identify future trends and patterns. With this information we work on neighbourhood solutions involving communities to drive them.
Funding Goal | 500,000 | |
Projected Cumulative Lives Impacted | 500 | |
New Implemented Countries | Nigeria, Tanzania | |
Recruit | 1 Technologist, 1 Management, 2 Project team members |