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Are You Not Tired Of Talks Without Action? This Is What YOU Can DO To Make Women Feel Safer In India
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95% women feel Unsafe outdoors in India. Mostly, because their father, brother or husband cannot rush to their aid in less than 5 minutes when they are in trouble.
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On the other hand, every street in India has at least 2 people who will rush to a woman’s aid if they knew she was in trouble.
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But there’s no way to connect the dots between the two.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J5j01ypIlQ
Enter #SAFE, a pan-India initiative driven by Social Cops, a technology social enterprise focused on harnessing the power of citizens & communities to solve real-life problems. In a campaign launched on Gandhi Jayanthi, in collaboration with India’s Joy of Giving Week — SAFE aims to find those two people on every street who would rush to help a woman in danger.
A first of its kind initiative, SAFE brings together the power of communities to solve the problem of women’s safety in India. The concept of “first responders” has previously been successfully used in instances such as providing first aid during accidents and SAFE aims to bring the first responder concept to address women’s safety with its “Community Watchers.”
How is SAFE going to work?
SAFE is an SOS mobile application — with an additional, powerful feature: the community watchers. When a girl is in trouble, SAFE sends an SOS not only to your emergency contacts but also to the community watchers around her. The community watchers are sent SOS messages with not only the girl’s location and contact details but also with the details of other community watchers in the vicinity. The aim is to crowdsource enough community watchers so that, there are enough community watchers in the vicinity of the girl and can reach the danger area in under 5 minutes to help her.
What Can YOU do?
From Oct — Dec 2013, SAFE is crowd sourcing Community Watchers — people who have the passion enough to not just talk about women’s safety, but actually step up and take responsibility of making women around them feel safer. A background check will be carried out on Community Watchers who sign up, and they will be given trainings too on Dec 16th, marking the one-year anniversary of Nirbhaya case — SAFE will be released in cities with the threshold number of community watchers.
The Call to Action Is Simple… If you want SAFE to come to your neighbourhood and have the courage to step up as a Community Watcher: Sign up as a community watcher NOW. Click here.
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Raj
Does this movement think men are disposable and not worthy of protection from violence, fear and coercion? Why does it want to offer no protection to men , yet expect both men and women to respond to a woman’s emergency? Why does it have to be so sexist?
Keep doing this kind of discrimination and you will go further from the safe society you wish to achieve. Be inclusive and it will strengthen the community spirit.
prukalpa
Hi Raj, This is Prukalpa – one of the volunteers at SAFE. Thanks for your feedback. We have no aim to be sexist at all, and in fact the team internally did debate about the possibility of offering the solution as a common tool for community response to crime and violence. However, we realized that when you start an initiative- it is important to start somewhere – and the truth remains that the problem faced by women in the country in terms of safety concerns are far larger than the number faced by men. We are not calling for men or women to respond to a woman’s emergency – we are calling for human beings to respond to a woman’s emergency. We are only trying to solve a problem that we are passionate about, and not aiming to discriminate against anybody. SAFE is a volunteer driven people’s initiative and will only be successful if the citizens of the country stand up to support it. Thankyou.
Raj
No, men are much more likely to be victims of violent crime. Apart from rape, men get beaten up, robbed, murdered, kidnapped far more often then women. Practically all our military, CRPF,police casualties are men, who give up their lives defending HUMANS from terrorists and criminals. And even for rape, men are routinely raped in prisons (and no, they don’t deserved to be raped even if they are criminals or undertrials), not to mention outside of prisons. Men are also far more likely to be abused physically as well as sexually at school and colleges, and are often asked to perform sexual acts as a part of ragging. So I disagree when you say that women face far more problems. It’s just that our sexist society places the value of of women and children over men’s. Perhaps it was evolutionarily an optimum strategy, but I don’t see why it should be continued.
Of course you are discriminating, when you say you are calling “humans” to respond to a woman’s emergency, but staying silent on the issue of man’s emergency. You have full right to continue with your movement. I just feel it should be more inclusive.
Shanthan Reddy
Hey Raj! I actually got a great idea! Let’s optimize this app for millitary people, for robbery, for terrorism, and whatever you mentioned. Sounds great?
Raj
Actually this app by itself will help both men and women. And of course it can be adapted to helping the military and the police. At least somebody thinks that men and women in uniform also deserve the sympathy of being victims rather than just being given some medals. The vast majority of technologies benefit both men and women, not just one gender.
But my point was the way the whole thing was marketed. When you have an app which can help everybody why market it in a sexist manner?
To me it is as divisive as marketing an app for white people for their protection. That is implicitly racist since it naturally begs the question ” Why, won’t the app help black people and other racial groups?”