SafeStreet: empowering women against street harassment using a privacy-aware location based application

Abstract

Sexual harassment of women in public places (e.g., foot-paths, buses, and shopping malls) of major cities in developing countries is a growing concern. These harassments can happen in various forms ranging from commenting, catcalling, and staring to touching and groping, to attacking and raping. Though, the most severe form of harassments such as attacking and raping get some attention from the society, NGOs and law-enforcement agencies, unfortunately, other forms of harassments that are more widespread in public places remain largely un-attended or ignored in our conservative society. However, these harassments are more common and can have various negative psychological impacts on women that include a persistent feeling of insecurity, loss of self-esteem, restricted participation in daily life activities in public places. In this paper, we propose a crowd-powered privacy-aware location based mobile application, SafeStreet, that empowers women in public places against sexual harassments. SafeStreet allows a women to privately capture and share her own experiences in the street. SafeStreet enables a women to find a safe path, i.e., the path to a destination that has less harassment hazard, at any point of time.