Sexual Harassment Reporting Site Asks Users to “Pin the Creeps”

A community-based platform is helping women document and map out incidents of sexual harassment, and it just received a major investment to continue its work. SafeCity, which was founded after the horrific 2012 gang rape of a student on a South Delhi bus, allows users to “pin the creeps” and report their experiences of assault anonymously. Although their current focus is on India, the organization has been receiving responses from all over the world. Each contribution is geo-tagged and placed on an interactive map. Founder Elsa D’Silva says she hopes the website will provide a more accurate representation of how frequently incidents of sexual harassment and assault occur on a geographic basis.

“If there are poor official statistics, the problem is not visible and is not a true representation of the actual problem,” she told Tech in Asia. “Therefore we need to break our silence and document every instance of harassment and abuse in public spaces so that we can find the most effective solutions at the neighborhood level.”

Users of the site are prompted not only to identify the location of the incident, but the nature of it as well. Reports can be categorized under labels like “catcalls/whistles” or “rape/sexual assault.” There is a text box where they can describe the details of their experience in their own words. On the map, each incident is represented by a red dot. The largest cluster of incidents recorded occur in North India, where more than 3,600 reports have been made. D’Silva says with the new funding they hope to get 10,000 incidents reported. They already have 5,500 on the site.