Imagine A World Where We Felt Safe. What Would Be The First Thing You’d Do?

First, every woman has a story. There is shared experience all over the world: we hear the same fears and experiences from women in rural India, the slums of Cairo, or an apartment block in London.

Second, the best solutions work when we come together: training public transport drivers, bar staff and street support; rolling out tech solutions to give women better ways of seeking help or a safe route home. And most importantly, to change the things our society sees as acceptable behaviour towards women in the street, on public transport, and online.

The solutions we find look different in different parts of the world, which is why we always create them based on data and stories gathered from thousands of women who know their public spaces best, and where the issues lie.

Over the past year, we've held an incredible hackathon hosted for us by Beautystack’s CEO Sharmadean Reid, run campaigning and storytelling sessions with the Roundhouse and I WEIGH, and held workshops with Living Proof where more than 500 women created ideas for safer spaces; we took this to Parliament this week.

New supporters are coming on board every day, from The National Lottery Community Fund’s ‘Emerging Futures’ Fund to the new All-Party Parliamentary Group for UN Women, so we need to act, and to demand that leaders take action. Imagine a world… What would you do?, a film directed by Florence Winter Hill at Missing Link Films, is a window into the reality we could live in if we come together and use all of this momentum to take action right now. We're raising our voices together, and the world is listening.

Hopefully, we will never again in our lifetime experience a nation in lockdown, and will soon return to public spaces together. We need to be ready for that time with new urban design solutions to reduce the risk of violent behaviour, to have a better response from emergency services, for nightclubs to act when violence does happen, and with education and behavioural science programmes so we start to see change in preventing violent behaviour in the first place.

It is no exaggeration to say that this is a human rights crisis. But we know we can change that to help women and marginalised groups be safe, included, and free.

Please add your name to our open letter and become part of the Safe Spaces Now community at unwomenuk.org.

Claire Barnett is Executive Director of UN Women UK.