Strategies to improve safety must come from women’s experiences.

The gendered safety concerns revealed by the project provides strong evidence against safety strategies that are solely concerned with ‘improved lighting’ or passive and/or active formal surveillance. Instead, strategies to improve safety must be informed by women’s lived experiences and include actions that bring about stronger connections among different user groups of public spaces.

Associate Professor Nicole Kalms

The Safe Spaces project was developed to enhance the capability of local councils and other community focussed organisations to engage women from diverse backgrounds to better understand why some public spaces and places are viewed as ‘unsafe’. Understanding both the specific physical and the social elements of public places that lead to feelings of worry and exclusion is foundational for the development of place-based strategies that encourage inclusion and safety for women.

The evidence from the project activities provides a deeper understanding of these issues and offers critical insights that can be harnessed to enhance safety and inclusion in public places for women. These insights point to the value of strengthening partnerships within and across local councils and highlight the need for the development of socially and culturally relevant strategies to engage diverse groups of women. In summary, the project reveals how different ways of engaging women to understand safety and inclusion reveal different aspects of the problems and different ways to solve them.

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• Investigators

  • • Associate Professor Nicole Kalms
      Monash Art, Design and Architecture
    • Professor Rebecca Wickes
      Griffith University

• Co-investigators

  • • Dr Charishma Ratnam
      Monash University
      Professor Murray Lee
      University of Sydney
      Dr Gill Matthewson
      Monash Art, Design and Architecture
      Professor Silke Meyer
      Monash University & Griffith University

• Partner organisation

  • Department of Justice and Community Safety, Victorian Government
  • Welcoming Australia
  • Melton City Council
  • City of Monash
  • Wyndham City Council

• Funded by:

  • Building Safer Communities 2021-22 Crime Prevention Innovation Fund

• Undertaken within

  • XYX Lab – Gender + Place