Dutch municipalities lack oversight of places where women feel unsafe
Over 90 percent of Dutch municipalities do not have an overview of places where women feel unsafe, Pointer found when surveying the municipal authorities one year after a study among women identified 14,000 locations in the country where they don’t feel safe.
Pointer contacted all 342 Dutch municipalities and asked whether they had a list of places in their municipality where women feel unsafe. Of the 212 that responded, over 90 percent said they did not have a specific overview.
Many municipalities said that they regularly “monitor safety in the municipality” and discuss reports of unsafe situations with the police. Several municipalities also said they were using the map of unsafe spaces Pointer made last year when surveying women.
Previous research by the program showed that the authorities did little with women’s reports of unsafe spaces. According to the almost 10,000 women surveyed last year, only 12 percent of the reports they filed with their municipality ever got a follow-up. The vast majority of women don’t report unsafe locations to the authorities, partly due to a lack of trust that anything will happen with their reports.
Eva James, an urban researcher who researches women’s experiences in public spaces, was surprised that almost no municipality has an overview of unsafe places for women. “I think collecting such data is crucial. Then there needs to be a commitment to do something with that data and actually take action. It would be good if municipalities finally started listening to women when designing public spaces. This has been a blind spot for years,” she told Pointer.
According to James, a dedicated reporting point could help build women’s trust in reporting unsafe spaces. “A reporting center that’s part of a gender equality team in municipalities seems fantastic to me. Such a team would, among other things, consider the female perspective when designing public spaces. We often think that public spaces are neutral, that we exist in equality, but that’s not the case. Women experience public spaces very differently from men.”
None of the surveyed municipalities had a dedicated point where women could report unsafe spaces, though most have a general center where everyone can report problems with public space, like broken streetlights and nuisances. Many municipalities also pointed to their hotlines for sexual harassment on the street as an opportunity for women to report unsafe situations.
The Netherlands spent several weeks on high alert for women’s safety following the brutal killing of 17-year-old Lisa from Abcoude in Duivendrecht in August. A man attacked her, stabbing her 17 times, as she cycled home from a night out with friends in Amsterdam. The same man is also suspected of sex crimes against two other women.
Lisa’s murder, combined with several recent femicides and sexual attacks, sparked nationwide protests against gender-based violence and for creating a society where women can also be safe on the streets. Men sexually harassed multiple women at those protests.
Following these attacks, the broadcaster AT5 surveyed Amsterdam women and found that 85 percent of them had spaces they avoided in the Dutch capital because they felt unsafe. These often included city parks, shopping districts after closing time, and bicycle tunnels.
