Fostering safer parks for women and girls through multi-agency collaboration, knowledge exchange and the co-design of research-informed guidance

Fostering safe and inclusive public spaces where women and girls' feel safe is of national and international concern. In the UK, the murders of Sabina Nessa in 2021 and sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman in 2020 show that there is a need to improve the safety of public spaces, notably urban parks, and enhance women's feelings of safety whilst using them. Public parks have been shown to have numerous benefits for health and wellbeing, yet research consistently finds that personal safety is a significant factor constraining women's access to and use of green spaces, thereby reducing those benefits. Indeed, the Office for National Statistics (2021) found that feeling unsafe walking alone in public places such as streets, busy transport hubs and local parks, disproportionately affects women and girls, particularly after dark. Gender disparities are greatest for park settings where 81% of women reported feeling unsafe walking alone after dark, compared with 39% of men (ONS, 2021). Moreover, across Europe, women are between 2.5 and 5.7 times more likely to feel unsafe walking alone than men after dark, according to the European Social Survey. Some countries, such as Norway, have managed to significantly narrow this gender gap.

Effective prevention of VAWG in urban parks involves designing and managing these public spaces in ways which both deter potential offending and ensure women and girls feel safe. Building upon and harnessing the findings of recently completed research into women and girls' safety in public parks led by Barker and Holmes, this partnership collaboration between West Yorkshire Police, the Mayor of West Yorkshire, West Yorkshire Combined Authority, Keep Britain Tidy, Make Space for Girls, Leeds Women's Aid, the ESRC Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre and the University of Leeds aims to foster a paradigm shift in the way professionals think about women's safety, develop regional and national guidance for safer, women friendly parks and co-design new research activities that seek to understand how holistic multi-agency approaches involving sympathetic crime prevention and landscape design, neighbourhood policing and park management can contribute to preventing and reducing VAWG in parks, enhance feelings of safety and build trust and confidence in policing.

Crime prevention design can be intrusive, unsightly and exclusionary, which could actually increase women and girls' fear, and reduce footfall, which itself acts as natural guardianship as people pass through a park. It can also have other potentially negative environmental and social impacts, such as the impact of safety lighting and vegetation management on biodiversity and the impact of physical security measures on accessibility and social inclusion. The project will co-design new directions in research that create new ways to think about park design and park policing that contribute to the effective prevention and reduction of VAWG and build confidence in policing, while ensuring that crime prevention is sympathetic to the park environment, mitigates environmental impacts and does not convey a message of alertness or fear, which is the opposite of the sense of nature, freedom and calmness that green spaces offer.

Outcomes from this project include: research-informed, co-produced regional and national guidance for safer, women friendly parks; an international symposium on women's safety in public spaces; making parks safer places for women and girls through changing the ways professionals think about women's safety and strengthening multi-agency partnership working; and co-designed plans for new research activities linked to this agenda.