Voices of Change | Women Deserve More Than “Be Careful” | 18 September 2026

Voices of Change | Women Deserve More Than “Be Careful” | 18 September 2026 Vusi.Bafetane Fri, 09/18/2026 - 20:08

A City Is Not Truly Public If Women Have To Negotiate Their Way Through It

Women’s safety is often treated as a policing problem. It is also a question of urban design, mobility, economic participation and who is able to use a city without fear.

A city reveals its priorities through the freedoms it makes possible.

Who can walk to a taxi rank after dark? Who can wait alone for transport? Who feels able to exercise in a park, work a late shift, meet friends after sunset or take the shortest route home rather than the safest one?

These may look like private decisions. Collectively, they are part of the architecture of public life.

When women repeatedly alter where they go, when they travel and how they move because of the possibility of violence, the consequence is larger than inconvenience. Their access to the city itself begins to contract.

UN-Habitat has long argued that fear of violence can restrict women’s ability to move, work, study and participate in city life. Its work on women’s safety also connects that experience to apparently ordinary features of urban environments: lighting, roads, transport, the management of public spaces and the way neighbourhoods are designed and maintained.

That suggests a different way of thinking about safety.

Safety is also infrastructure

Streetlights are rarely described as gender policy. Neither are pavements, reliable public transport, visible activity around transport nodes, maintained public spaces or the location of bus and taxi stops.

Yet all of them influence whether a journey feels possible.

This is important because cities can reproduce inequality without formally excluding anyone. A park may technically be open to everybody, but not everybody experiences the same freedom to use it. A transport system may operate late into the evening, but that does not automatically mean a woman feels safe walking from the stop to her home.

The distinction is between access on paper and access in practice.

UN Women’s Safe Cities work reflects this broader understanding. Its programmes have included women’s participation in urban planning, better data about unsafe

spaces, changes to transport planning and partnerships between local authorities, communities and women’s organisations.

Safety, viewed this way, becomes part of how a city functions rather than something added after violence occurs.

Fear carries an economic cost

Restricted movement also has consequences that rarely appear in discussions about violence.

Cities depend on mobility. People must be able to reach jobs, education, shops, healthcare, social networks and economic opportunities. If one part of the population has to calculate those movements around fear, access to opportunity is no longer equal.

The cost can be subtle. A job becomes less attractive because the shift ends after dark. A longer journey is chosen because the shorter route feels unsafe. Money is spent on private transport because walking or public transport feels too risky. Social and recreational activities become harder to access.

None of those decisions requires an actual incident to have occurred. Fear alone can reshape behaviour.

That makes women’s safety an economic and developmental question as much as a criminal-justice one.

The strongest cities design for freedom, not avoidance

South Africa’s own National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide recognises prevention as broader than law enforcement. Its six-pillar approach includes prevention, justice and protection, survivor support, economic power and institutional accountability.

International prevention frameworks make a similar point. The World Health Organization’s RESPECT Women framework includes making environments safe alongside services, empowerment, preventing abuse and changing harmful social norms.

The common principle is important: violence cannot be prevented by asking potential victims to become more skilled at avoiding it.

The better question for municipalities, planners, transport authorities, police, businesses and communities is whether the environments they shape expand or restrict women’s choices.

A genuinely safe city should allow an ordinary life to remain ordinary.

The ultimate measure is therefore not how many precautions women know how to take.

It is how few precautions they need in order to participate fully in public life.

References

UN-Habitat. Creating Engagement in Public Spaces for Safer Cities for Women. UN-Habitat. The Global Assessment on Women’s Safety. UN Women. Safe Cities and Safe Public Spaces for Women and Girls. South African Government. National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide 2020–2030. World Health Organization. RESPECT Women: Preventing Violence Against Women, second edition, 2025.

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