Hi, Holly, how are you doing? 

 

Hi. Good, thanks, David. How are you?

 

I'm very good, thank you. I'd like to talk to you about women's safety in the city in the run up to International Women's Day on the 8th of March, and particularly the work you've been doing in this area. Could you tell me in broad detail about the safety audits pilot project you've done, commissioned by TfL and the mayor's office?

 

Sure, absolutely. As you said, it's commissioned by Transport for London and the Mayor's Office for policing and crime – which is a bit of a new one for us, but has been very interesting. The pilot project is intended to inform those organizations, but I think, also be relevant to others, in the ways in which we can think about how to incorporate women's voices when we're thinking about investment in public spaces and the design of public spaces. Specifically, there's been a mayoral commitment to undertake women's safety audits in London; I think we can all imagine in our heads what that might be, but there's actually nothing on paper that says, what is a women's safety audit? 

 

Yeah. What does it look like? 

 

Yes. So that's our exam question – what is a women's safety audit? And that's what we've been working on over about the last year. We had five pilot locations across London - various different types of places. We were working in Brixton, Walthamstow, Brent, Uxbridge and in Paddington, looking at those places with groups of women. The process that we proposed, which wasn't explicit in the brief but was something that we felt was important, was for this to be a peer-led process. We recruited 47 community researchers – women in each of these locations – and then they were trained. They received training and support and resources to then go out and undertake their own audits with their own networks and peers, so that the conversation was around how safe do you feel? How does this place make you feel? Do you feel nervous? Do you feel comfortable? Do you feel anxious? Or perhaps it was experiences that they've had in those places – and those kinds of conversations were happening peer to peer. So, between a sister and a sister, or between friends, between flatmates, rather than us as professionals coming in with a clipboard to ask you these sensitive things.

 

When you say place, do you mean, for instance, Brixton? Do you mean the wider definition of Brixton? Or a street in Brixton? How did that frame itself?

 

So, these were set by the client group, and they were quite broad. We were looking at Paddington Green; in Brixton we were primarily focused on Brixton Road and the area around the tube station, but we'd let people be guided by the groups that they were working with around “well, let me tell you about this area, this is problematic”. And that was part of the process, it's almost like a diagnostic, really, in this area in general, with some sort of broader spatial parameters, but not a hard red line. Where are the areas that you feel that we should talk about? That process of having the community researchers leading their own research allowed them to set or, if I'm doing a walking route, this is the route that I'm going to take, and I want to speak to people about. We gave them a number of different methods and processes they were trained with to undertake the research. And some of those were quite specific. So, kind of checklists: are the lights working? Is the pavement in good condition? Those sorts of things. Others were a little bit more free form. We called them multi-sensory mapping. For example, one was about different exercises, like: how tense are your shoulders feeling right now? Can you get in touch with how your body is, sort of telling you that you feel without just thinking: safe or not safe. Or: close your eyes for 30 seconds, and what are the things that you notice? Or, if you stand in one spot and just do a very slow 360 degrees, what are the things that you're noticing that are making you feel safe or unsafe in that place? So, it was quite fine grain, actually, the sort of exercises that we're asking people to undertake, but it was important that we weren't too prescriptive, I think, around valid questions or answers? 

 

I note from the blurb that the audits included women aged 17 to 79, which seems very specific, meaning there was somebody who was 79, I presume. Did you note any difference in terms of trends from the younger respondents to the older respondents, or were there any other trends across any other groups?

 

I think one of the key things that we found was not so much about trends, but about the diversity of individual experiences. So, if we're thinking about Walthamstow Central, there's a very busy street, and across Market Street that's very populated. Some people said that they that made them feel very, very safe. Others felt like, well, this is just too much, neurologically; ‘I'm a bit overwhelmed so I'm going to take the back road instead, just to be somewhere a bit calmer’. So, it was more that it was very hard to make an individual rule. But there were some very specific things that came up. For example, one of our researchers spoke to some school-aged girls, and they all reported that they were more likely to receive unwanted attention when out and about in public spaces, if they were wearing their school uniform, compared with if they weren't.

 

Really?

 

With those kinds of things – unless you're sort of leaving the space for that conversation – when are you ever going to do a survey form that allows you to pick up that kind of feedback? So, it was more the wide diversity of experiences, which isn't necessarily the easiest thing to then design for. But I think it's important that we understand the full spectrum and colour and diversity and fidelity, I guess, of women’s experiences in the city. 

 

How safe do you feel in London?

 

I would say I feel pretty safe. I think maybe that's (laughs) my personal life circumstances at the moment, because I'm not particularly out late. I am a confident cyclist. I'm not often moving around, particularly on my own. At those times when I have felt threatened in the past have probably been that kind of classic journey home after later into the evening. Unfortunately for me, I don't get the opportunity to do that very much anymore because of the small children I am responsible for! I would say, personally, I generally feel pretty safe, but I also have been in London for a long time, and I'm, I don't know, a belligerent (laughs) woman of a certain age. I think that was one of the other things that's interesting in our feedback; that people are able to reflect on their past experiences. And I think that period in your 20s, there's a certain kind of threat that you can feel from the city. As a child, there's maybe different kinds of threat. And what was interesting is the trade off, maybe between road safety and personal safety that some people reported; the little tactics that women use to help themselves feel safer, like walking around instead of stopping at a bus stop, just walking back and forth past the bus stop to make it look like you're going somewhere until your bus comes. There are these sorts of little habits that people get into, to moderate...

 

...keys in the hand is another one I've heard, which is a bit frightening, 

 

Yes, that comes up a lot. I mean, I was at school when I first remember somebody describing to me, well, this is the thing that you do if you're not feeling safe. So that doesn't feel new, and I would hope but I actually don't know that that's lessening. I think that that's still definitely something that happens.

 

Is it your perception that safety for women in the city is becoming more problematic or less? What's your sense of that?

 

I think it's tricky. I mean, my perception is that we're talking about it more, which feels like a good thing, and feels like that must lead to some level of change. But whether that means that we're then more conscious of it... I think it's a funny thing; I've had this conversation with a couple of men as well, who were surprised that that is an experience. To me, it's surprising that you could have had a period where you were walking around on your own late at night and you didn't feel scared. That there's a sort of assumption that that's a scary thing and that there is the whole half of society – or maybe I'm speaking in broad terms about men – but that wouldn't be the way that you walk around. It's mind blowing to me, maybe in the same way that it's mind blowing to some men that you would walk around with your keys, and I think that means that we're all maybe more conscious of this issue, which perhaps makes it feel more dominant. And clearly cases like Sarah Everard are so immensely troubling, that it perhaps feels worse. But I think that the greater level of interrogation that's happening on this matter brings it more to prominence, which maybe makes it feel, and perhaps it is, worse. But I'm hopeful that that leads to change.

 

So finally, what needs to happen? What's a good output for this material? Should there be more work done in this area? Is there anything in terms of legislation or recommendations that could be put out in terms of the design of our cities, or buildings even?

 

We've tried to steer away from giving specific design recommendations. And actually, when you think about it, the idea that we could say, oh, so long as your lights are all 20 meters apart from each other, everybody will feel safe – it doesn't make any sense. That isn't the case, and that isn't what we're reporting. What we're trying to do is set out a process which is robust and rigorous, and that, as I said before, is a really good diagnostic to understand what the issues in relation to women’s safety are, if you're thinking about investment or design in a particular area. And so, a good process or good outcome of this process for us is that that is adopted by Transport for London, by the Mayor's office for policing and crime, by anybody who thinks about spaces in the city, I guess, particularly in London at the moment. And that they're fluent in saying, well, let's make sure that we've really got to the bottom of what are our safety issues here, not making assumptions based on crime statistics, which are poorly reported, or by assumptions around we need to sort out the lighting in this corner, and that will make it better. That there isn't a go-to sort of checklist of if you design these things in this certain way, then that will address these issues, but that you're hearing from women and girls about their own lived experiences in that place. And if that becomes the modus operandi of dealing with public space in London, then I think that's a really good outcome; that we're all consciously thinking about it and not making assumptions.

 

Hear, hear! Well, thank you very much for your time. It's really fascinating work.

 

Thanks very much. 

 

Cheers, Holly