After Sarah Everard's murder brought violence against women into the very forefront of public consciousness, numerous safety apps have been publicised as helpful tools to keep us safe on the streets. Most recently, Path Community was released into the app stores - but was met with a whirlwind of controversy.
It started when the Home Office backed the technology. ‘We need a whole-of-society approach to tackling violence against women and girls and I welcome initiatives from the private sector that deliver on this aim,’ the minister Rachel Maclean said.
This was met with anger from Reclaim These Streets' Anna Birley who commented: ‘The Home Office backing of this app is insulting to women and girls…We already share our location, we already ask our friends to text us when they get home, we already wear bright clothes, stick to the well-lit routes and clutch our keys between our fingers. It still isn’t enough. Women and girls, and the steps that we take to stay safe every day, are not the problem. The problem is that male violence makes us unsafe.’
Path Community is a free app that encourages crowdsourced safe routes home by allowing users to flag potentially unsafe and unlit sections of streets, underneath bridges, or through parks, for example. It also lets individuals share their route home and if their ‘guardian’ (singular or plural depending on whether users want to be linked with one friend or a group) that they’ve shared it with sees them veer off their route, stop, or start moving at a ‘dramatically increased speed’ then they know exactly where the user is in case of an emergency.
But Reclaim These Streets’ concerns were echoed by the chief executive of Women’s Aid Farah Nazeer, who told the Guardian that safety apps could be misused by abusers and used to track victim’s whereabouts. According to Nazeer, men could use the technology to ‘potentially extend an abuser’s reach beyond the home, controlling women in spaces they previously felt safe and free.’
Grazia spoke to Path Community founder Harry Mead, who actually agreed with the both the statements made by Reclaim These Streets and Women’s Aid.
‘I absolutely agree it can be a tool for abusers,’ he said. ‘That’s why we made the conscious choice to make journeys single serving. So, if you do choose to connect to a guardian (a completely optional step)…then guardians have no control over that link,’ he continued. ‘As soon as you reach your destination it’s turned off, whereas with WhatsApp or Find My Friends it can permanently be sharing your location.
‘If someone's really determined to use Path to keep track of someone and call their partner and force them to make them a guardian every single time they go out, there's not a huge amount I can do about that,’ he acknowledged.
‘But what we've tried to do is design Path in such a way that it's a very difficult thing to use for those kinds of functions. So, if you want to abuse it, it's just a really inefficient way to do it. Whenever we look at a function, we try and look at how it can be abused and how we can protect people from that,’ Mead said.
When Path was being created, it was built collaboratively by a team of volunteers who all fed into the design. Mead told Grazia that 80% of these volunteers were women, many of whom were victims of abuse themselves. ‘Their input has helped guide the way it works,’ says Mead. ‘We were really conscious of not wanting to make the situation worse.’
Responding to Anna Birley’s comment that safety apps couldn’t be the Home Office’s one solution to making women feel safe from male violence on the street at night, Mead agreed. ‘I absolutely do believe that an app isn't the solution,’ he told Grazia.
'If something goes wrong, a response can be there in 90 seconds - rather than after two days of canvassing'
‘It's a societal and educational issue. It needs to be fixed at the root,’ Mead continued. ‘But that will take several years, if not decades, to really start having a tangible effect. What we want to do in the short term, and the reason we're doing Path, is not it's not to say that it's a solution. But it’s to make the journey, for those who choose to use it, just a little bit better.
‘If something does go wrong, the people you’re linked with know within 60 seconds and five feet of where they can download your route and get back to the police. A response can be there in 90 seconds, rather than it taking two days of canvassing to find out where someone might have been taken,’ he said.
Referencing the vile incident where a woman was raped near Streatham Common while on her morning run in January, Mead said: Everyone I’ve spoken to in that area [of where the crime occurred] has said, “Yes, it’s really bad”. In the middle of the morning, it’s pitch black and it’s really dodgy.
‘The problem is, when one person reports [an area of danger] to the police it doesn’t have much impact. The medium term of what we’re trying to do was to perform this function where I can show the council that 10,000 people who live in your area think that it’s a threat at these times [of day] and you need to do something about it. It’s nigh on impossible for them [the council] to ignore it. Because it’s a very strong case. And it’s the same with the police,’ Mead claimed.
When asked what he thought the solution to male violence was, if it wasn’t his app, Mead told Grazia: ‘We need to start working on the long-term solution, which is education and societal reform… We also need to be working on medium term improvement—how do we make a city’s infrastructure itself safer for people walking on the streets? How do we get the police actually on patrols? And the short term, we just need to give people a bit more of a safety blanket.’
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