The creators of an app that draws maps of sexual harassment in Bangladesh hope it will make women feel safer and improve their political engagement
WOMEN walking down the streets of cities in Bangladesh face a daily onslaught of sexual harassment. Euphemistically known as it takes many forms, from women being told by men to adjust their clothing or headgear to suit religious mores, to sexually suggestive remarks, groping – and more serious sexual assaults.
Now a smartphone app has been created to help combat this. While making women feel safer is a major aim of the project, the creators also want to reduce the toll on the political lives of Bangladeshi women. By discouraging access to public space, street harassment silences women's voices and quashes their participation in public life, the team behind the app told a computing conference in Canada earlier this month.
The app has been developed by teams at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology and North South University – both in Dhaka – alongside Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Ishtiaque Ahmed at Cornell says the app – called Protobadi, meaning "one who protests" in Bengali – allows women to combat public harassment in three ways. First, it has an on-screen button that if pressed turns the phone into a shrill rape alarm. This action also sends text messages to the woman's emergency contacts saying where she is and that she needs help. Lastly, the incident data from all users is collated to create a heat map showing the areas where harassment is at its worst. In addition, the user can annotate the data with a brief blog post about the type of harassment they experienced.
Last summer, after publicising the app on Facebook and at their respective universities, the team asked 10 of the 110 people who signed up whether they felt the app helped or hindered them day to day. "They all felt safer having the app installed on their phone. They loved the fact that they had one-touch emergency access to their friends any time they needed help," says Ahmed. "Most of the participants considered the map useful in choosing their routes around Dhaka city."
Some had concerns, however, saying the maps, while useful, could also create no-go areas for women. But the aim, says Ahmed, is quite the opposite: the idea is to bring such areas to the attention of the authorities so action can be taken. "That way no-go areas can never be created."
That's easier said than done, however, because the definition of sexual harassment is far from a hard and fast one in the subcontinent's highly patriarchal societies, says Priya Virmani, a political and economic analyst based in Delhi, India. While she welcomes the app as a "great tool" with which women can begin fighting street harassment, she points out that the perpetrators could also consult the maps. "That could disperse the trouble – they might move to other parts of the city." What could improve the app, she says, would be linking it to a radio taxi service, which could prioritise the sending of cabs to women in distress – even if they have no cash on them.
The team sees possibilities in expanding the app's use to other countries where women suffer serious sexual harassment. For example, India, where "Eve teasing" is also common and where the fatal gang rape of a woman on a Delhi bus in December 2012 prompted the Indian government to classify sexual harassment as an offence. "Bottom-up initiatives like our app are also necessary to eradicate problems like sexual harassment," says Ahmed.
Phone sensors offer other improvement possibilities, says Samuel Johnston of OpenSignal, a London-based company that crowdsources mobile signal strength maps from apps on users' phones. Getting out a phone and pressing a button in a harassment situation could invite violence. "So enabling them to do this in less obvious ways could be a huge benefit," Johnston says. Emergency contacts could be triggered by rotating the phone or tapping on the screen in a certain way, he says.
Changing male behaviour could be a far harder task, however: a female Protobadi researcher experienced harassment, abuse and ridicule for posting flyers about the app at a university. The study there was suspended.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Hands off"
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