Lady, how safe is your area? Check it out on safecity.in

How safe is the area you work, travel or hangout. Check this out on www.safecity.in, set up by a group of three women in the city. It can help women across India ascertain the safety level of a place.

Every woman at some point of time do experience sexual harassment, but most ignore it due to lack of family support or to avoid hassles, ensuring that offenders go scot-free.

The website, started by Elsamarie D'silva, Surya Velamuri and Saloni Malhotra, allows women to share their experiences of harassment they have faced. The data shared are computed and hotspots marked on a map indicating the trend in a particular state, city, street or lane.

"Safecity is a crowd-map that converts individual stories into data which is then placed on a map. It's then easier to see location-level trend (a street). Focus is not on victim, but on solving the problem at neighbourhood level," said managing director of Safecity Elsamarie D'silva.

She added: "We collect experiences shared by ladies (stalking, staring, indecent behaviour, touching, groping, etc) and flag it on the place where it took place. If more incidents are reported from a particular place, it will be shown on the map. Any woman travelling to a place can check the safety level of that place on the website and plan accordingly."

According to Safecity team, the initiative has three objectives—to make people aware of street harassment, make woman break their silence, and give people information on how safe the place where you live, work or travel is. Finally, we want to help the local administration in solving the problem," said D'silva.

Goan police is highly appreciative of Safecity's work, with whom they have partnered. "There is an option on the website through which a victim who shares her story with us about Goa can make that a complaint to Goa police," said D'Silva, adding: In Mumbai we did a pilot project with Bandra police sharing statistics with them. We hope we can help the police more."

Bandra least safe
According to data collated by Safecity for Mumbai in which experiences of sexual harassment were shared, the upmarket area of Bandra topped the list followed by Kurla, Sion, CST station and Versova.