Women's Day 2023 | Walking in a man’s world

Walking is an underrated pleasure. It’s a slow and relaxing way of exploring a city. Walking, even leisurely, can help improve mental and physical health, according to a number of studies. That said, walking leisurely and safely is a privilege a lot of us don’t have, especially women.

To help change that narrative, the Women Walk at Midnight practice was founded. Started by Delhi-based theatre artist Mallika Taneja in 2016, it helped women destigmatise women walking at night in the streets.

“This practice wasn't born out of the necessity to take back the night. It was born out of just wanting to walk. Reclaiming the night just became a part of it. We experience the city in a way that we don’t otherwise and there is a rebellion and protest in that, but it’s first and foremost for ourselves” says Taneja.

Women Walk at Midnight aims to create a safe space for women and help them break out of their shell. It also gives these women a sense of fraternity as they meet other women from similar walks of life who have never braved the streets at these odd hours. With an exchange of anecdotes, cups of tea, and soothing music, the walks slowly help deconstruct the patriarchy that dictates that women shouldn’t be out after dark.

Breaking out of a creative block

A social media manager, who has been on a couple of walks, recalls the experience. “Delhi feels like a new city at night. The crowd rushing in and out of the metro station has been replaced by street dogs lounging outside them. At every turn, I could smell the sweet tea and the sharp smoke from an autowalla’s beedi,” says the person on condition of anonymity. Her work leaves her very less time to step out of the vicious cycle of work, home and daily chores. This experience, she says, has helped her get out of her creative block.

She says: “I was a part of the walk conducted on December 16 for the Nirbhaya incident before the pandemic. It was a chilling experience to walk the same roads as she did. It made us all realise that these walks are more than just for leisure’s sake. They were silent protests. We weren’t asking for much. We just wanted to slowly keep chipping away at the misogynistic mindsets by walking our walk.”

Women have been told time and again that walking alone on the streets is dangerous. Even in the modern metropolitan cities in India, women lack safety.

The government of Delhi has come up with several initiatives to try to make the city a safe place for women. Installation of CCTV cameras, more street lights at night, GPS and panic buttons on all public buses, marshals deployed around the city to monitor the situation and even a command centre at Kashmiri Gate in order to keep an eye on all the CCTV cameras installed.

Despite these measures, crime against women has been rampant. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report of 2021, there were 14,277 cases of crime against women in Delhi out of which only 274 cases were convicted.

According to Delhi Police Deputy Commissioner of Police and Public Relations Officer Suman Nalwa, the Delhi Police has taken several measures to ensure women’s safety in the city, especially in high-risk areas; they include deployment of female officers in the field, installing panic buttons, low response time to distress calls, app and Twitter support, presence of female officers in every station, and specific call helplines (1091 and 1096). “Currently women officers in the force are 13 percent and that number will increase to 25 percent by 2025.” she told Moneycontrol.

Unplanned urbanisation

In Delhi, there has been a substantial rise in population due to migration in the last two decades. This, in turn, led to rapid urbanization that was not properly planned for or managed. These problems include overcrowding, inadequate sanitation and housing, lack of clean water, unreliable public transportation systems, and insufficient street lighting, among others.

Additionally, these factors have encouraged and contributed to a culture that already treated women as second-class citizens. Even in 2022, women are expected to remain inside their homes after dark to avoid harassment by men who they may encounter on public transport or on the streets.

Professor Sanjay Gupta, who teaches transport planning in the School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), Delhi, says that at a city level, not much effort is put into focusing on the amenities on an individual group, let alone women. Spaces are designed not in a gender-neutral way, but a gender ignorant way.

He said, “It’s not often possible to design or plan spaces in a gender-specific way because our planning standards are not laid out like that. We have planning norms that just treat a person as a person. However, I think that when we are planning and designing spaces that we know a lot of women will be using, the micro-level details should be put into place, which unfortunately is not there in our practice.”

An example of improper urban planning in Delhi are the metro stations. They are equipped with details focused on women’s safety, but there is a lack of attention to detail outside the premises. “Metro station exits are not often well lit, or open up into back alleys with difficult access to the main road. There is a disconnect and women feel unsafe the moment they step out. This gap needs to be closed and for that the government must recognise it as an issue,” Gupta says.

A male world

The gender bias may not be consciously considered while urban spaces are in the planning phase but the lack of added details for the sake of women’s safety as a norm suggests that the default user is set to ‘male’.

In her book, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, journalist and activist Caroline Criado Perez points out: "We have unconsciously just presented the world as male.”

According to the book, these design failures are not intentional, but rather the result of a "data gap" in the amount of information that is collected about women. The world, according to Perez, has conveniently ignored and not taken into account the requirements of half the population. The book, according to her “... exposes the gender data gap – a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women’s lives”.

While infrastructural changes and improvements are necessary for the safety of women, another thing that is key to reducing crime is a change of mindset.

It is important to deconstruct the patriarchal conditioning so that women can do things as elementary as walking without looking over their shoulders at every turn.

The air around crimes such as molestation, harassment, and assault of women is almost always victim-blaming. Women are blamed for stepping out late, wearing short clothes, or going out without a male escort.

Walking on eggshells

Women are always told to walk on eggshells while approaching the streets. They are conditioned to believe that freedom is unsafe and restrain is desirable. By means of this narrative, society has managed to regulate how women move, when and where they go. Their fight for freedom hence, must first begin with their fight for the freedom of movement.

Movements like Women Walk at Midnight may seem like frivolous in a society that confronts bigger problems, but in reality, they are helping women claim their rightful place as free citizens.

The idea that women have the right to walk in the open without being hassled, harassed, or assaulted is a radical one. The lopsided focus on men's rights while ignoring women's needs further emphasizes that urban areas will continue to be unsafe for women if more women aren't included in the ideating phase of urban planning.