Women feel unsafe in public transport, stations, parks in the Netherlands

Women feel unsafe in public spaces in the Netherlands. The scariest places for them are public transport and stations, followed by forests, parks, and entertainment venues. Women avoid these places when they can, opt for alternative routes, or share their live location via their phone when in them, Pointer and AD found in a survey of over 7,400 women.

91 percent of women indicated they feel unsafe in train, metro, and bus stations, 82 percent feel unsafe in public transport, 90 percent don’t feel safe in parks and forests, and 74 percent fear something might happen to them in places like bars and clubs.

When asked specifically what they are scared of, three-quarters of women indicated that they think something could easily happen to them in these places. Over a third have actually experienced an incident in the places mentioned. Women feel most afraid in the evening and night.

Only 6 percent of respondents said they don’t change their behavior to feel safer in public spaces. The other 94 percent of women do. They avoid certain places in the dark, choose an alternative route, pretend to be on a call when they feel unsafe, or share their live location with friends or family via their phone. About 20 percent of women carry a light weapon, like pepper spray, or carry their keys between their knuckles in case they need to defend themselves.

The fact that women feel unsafe at stations and on public transport is not reflected in passenger surveys conducted by public transport companies. For example, almost all train stations score well in NS’s Station Experience Monitor.

Asked about this, NS told Pointer that it does note the gender of respondents when asked about experienced safety, but they don’t analyze the difference between men and women. NS even said it was considering scrapping the ‘gender question’ from its survey. “We want everyone to feel safe on our trains and at our stations. So we do not make a separate policy for men/women/other groups,” the Dutch rail company told the program.

That is terrible, according to Krista Schram, a researcher in Public Trust and Safety at InHolland. “The safety of women is not taken into account enough. Men and women find very different things important when it comes to safety. For example, women do not feel safer because of cameras or enforcement officers at the station. It does help if there is informal social control at a station,” she told Pointer.