Women’s Safety

All women have a right to feel safe in their community

INFORMATION DEVELOPED FOR ACT WOMEN
Women’s Health Matters has developed the following information resources for ACT women.
Canberra Safety Map
Guide: Staying safe online
Women’s safety assessments

All women have a right to feel safe in their community be that in public spaces or in the online environment. How safe women feel directly impacts their use of Canberra’s public places, spaces and transport so urban planning and design in the ACT is important to ensure the social participation of women. In the online world, while it’s important for everyone to learn how to protect ourselves and our privacy, this is particularly so for women who are more likely than men to experience online harassment, stalking and cyber bullying.

The Canberra context

Safety in ACT’s public spaces

Research conducted by Women’s Health Matters in 2019 What makes public spaces safer for ACT women? confirms that ACT women and men use public spaces differently and have different ideas about what makes them feel safe or unsafe in those spaces. Women report feeling more afraid in public places than men, particularly in relation to fear of crime, even though the evidence shows women are more likely to experience physical violence in their home by a current or previous partner.

Women feel unsafe:

in spaces that are poorly lit
in isolated areas or where there is no passive surveillance
where there is inadequate security or access to help, or
where there are other people in the area who may be a threat to their personal safety.

Areas where women report feeling unsafe include public parks, university campuses, isolated bike paths, bus stations and bus stops. Feeling safe for women includes good lighting, physical structures such as level and safe paths, adequate signage, no or limited entrapment sites and clear visibility of the area.

The findings from this 2019 research project reinforce those of a 2013 safety audit Women’s Health Matters conducted with older ACT women (women 60 years and older), “Where do older ACT women feel unsafe, and why?” – Results of an Older Women’s Safety Audit Project (2013). Sixty-five percent of respondents said they felt unsafe in public toilets. This is relevant to older women’s inclusion as research suggests that if public toilets are not available at public transport terminals and in city centres (within walking distance) some women will not travel at all. Fifty-eight percent surveyed said they felt unsafe at bus interchanges and 48 percent in major public car parks.

How safe women feel directly impacts their use of Canberra’s public places, spaces and transport. This affects the amount of time they spend walking, running, or cycling for recreation, their use of public transport after dark, their willingness to go out at night and to go out alone.

Simply put, when women feel unsafe they participate less in physical activity, they’re less likely to use active travel for work or study and are less likely to participate in community or social events at night.

Online safety

Communicating online is an important and essential way for us to stay connected. As is the case across Australia, women in the ACT are increasingly using the internet to access information and services, manage finances and assets, communicate with family and friends and access social networking and dating sites.

With the rise in online communication comes increase risk. A 2018 survey of 502 Australian women aged 18-55 found a strong link between online abuse and gender and sexuality:

Women are more likely to be targets of online abuse in all its forms.
Women are abused online at an unacceptably high rate—30% surveyed said that they had experienced online abuse or harassment.
Abuse of women starts early. Seven out of ten Australian girls aged 15 to 19 believe online harassment and bullying is endemic. For these women, receiving unwanted and uninvited sexually explicit content online is now considered common behaviour.
Compared to their male peers, girls online are facing more threats of sexual violence, more comments about their appearance and behaviour, and are more often told not to speak out and have an opinion.
Women are more likely than men to fear for their safety due to image-based abuse.
Women (39%) were more likely than men (30%) to be victimised by an intimate partner or ex-partner.
Women are twice as likely as men likely to have their nude/sexual images shared without consent (15% women aged 18+, 7% of men aged 18+)
Online abuse can silence women’s voices—40% of women who said that they had experienced abuse or harassment on a social media platform either ceased or decreased their use of the platforms; 27% said they had stopped posting content that expressed their opinion on certain issues.

These findings further reinforce the importance of a gender lens if we are to tackle the challenges of online safety.

What we are doing about it

We have developed the Canberra Safety Map to help us understand what elements contribute to spaces being perceived to be safe or unsafe by ACT women, as well as safety assessment questionnaires you can use to assess the safety of public events and public spaces. These assessments have now been adapted and are also used by the ACT Office for Women.

We consulted with ACT women about changes to their local bus stops and they told us that one of the key factors which contributed to them feeling unsafe and more vulnerable at those stops was a lack of lighting. We conducted a safety of the top 40 bus stops and release a report on the results which highlighted the issues and options. As a result, the Government invested extra funding for “Improved and enhanced lighting to provide safer public spaces and pedestrian areas identified in the ‘Woman’s Safety Audit’(Women’s Centre for Health Matters).

We have also developed a cyber safety guide, Staying Safe on Line, for women in the ACT. This guide contains straightforward information in one place about how to protect your online privacy and your computer from viruses and unauthorised access, where to get help if you don’t feel safe online, as well as some of the most common internet scams and how to recognise them.

We will continue to use the voices of women to influence the future design of public spaces in the ACT by providing feedback to the ACT Government about the local information gained from the Canberra Safety Map and safety assessments. And we will continue to use the voices of women to bring a gender lens to inform policy design and the development of resources to support online safety and safety in ACT’s public spaces.