Scores of women in India are downloading and using mobile ‘safety apps’ as a way of guarding against rape. Credit: vgrigas/CC-BY-SA-2.0

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI, Nov 14 2014 (IPS)

It was 9:45 pm when 23-year-old Manira Chaudhury, a final-year Master’s student in New Delhi, who was traveling home in a rickshaw, pressed a button on her smart phone that sent out emergency alerts to two of her closest friends.

Immediately, two frantic calls followed.

“I am safe,” Chaudhury assured her distressed friends. “I was just checking that the app works.”

She uses VithU, a mobile phone app developed by Channel V, which was launched in November last year in India in the aftermath of the horrific rape-murder of a 23-year-old paramedical student in a moving bus in the Indian capital on Dec. 16, 2012.

The smart phone app is activated by tapping twice on an icon on the screen, which instantly sends the following message to pre-loaded emergency contacts: ‘I am in danger. I need help. Please follow my location’, along with details of the sender’s whereabouts.

“Fortunately I have never faced a situation where I felt the need to use it,” Chaudhury tells IPS. “But I think it is important to have it. I don’t think girls should have to live in constant fear of an attack but at the same time we cannot live in denial.

“We know bad things are happening out there and it’s wise to take certain precautions,” she explains.

After ‘Nirbhaya’

"I don’t think girls should have to live in constant fear of an attack but at the same time we cannot live in denial. We know bad things are happening out there and it’s wise to take certain precautions." -- Manira Chaudhury, a final-year Master’s student in New Delhi
While dime-a-dozen safety apps are now available in India, mostly launched by mobile phone companies and other private groups, the Government of India plans to launch a safety app of its own later this month, as an auxiliary service to the existing 181 helpline for women, which was started after the fatal Delhi bus rape.

“This new app will also facilitate pre-registering of crimes based on perceived threats,” says Khadijah Faruqui, a women’s rights activist and human rights lawyer who is heading the 181 Helpline.

Safety apps are just one of many responses to the 2012 gang rape, which sparked massive protests around this country of 1.2 billion, with scores of people taking to the streets to demand tougher laws, increased security measures, sensitization of the police force and stronger government action to tackle sexual violence against women.

Lawmakers and politicians responded to the tragedy by pushing out the Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, 2013, which incorporates various sexual crimes into the penal code, and promises stiffer penalties for offenses such as stalking, voyeurism or harassment.

The government also established six new fast-track courts to hear rape cases, and experts say there has been an explosion in public debate about women’s safety.

Still, millions of women continue to live in fear, while the frequency and brutality of rapes appears unchanged despite tougher laws.

The latest figures provided by India’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) in 2012 point to 24,923 rapes per year, while police reports from various cities show an alarming rise in assaults in 2013-2014.

India’s financial hub, Mumbai, which used to be considered a safe place for women, witnessed a 43-percent rise in the number of reported rapes this year compared to the previous year, according to the city’s police.

Meanwhile, the capital city saw an alarming five-fold rise in sexual assaults in 2013, police records say.

An abundance of apps

Against this backdrop, many women have welcomed the rise in innovative solutions to the constant threat of sexual violence.

For instance, Microsoft India recently released the safety application called ‘Guardian’ for Windows phones, which allows users to select a ‘track me’ feature that enables friends and family to follow the person in real-time using cloud services, among others.

The app also comes with an SOS alert function and a feature that allows the user to record evidence of an attack.

According to Microsoft-IT India Managing Director Raj Biyani, “It is a robust personal security app with more safety features and capabilities than any other comparable app available to Indian smart phone users today.”

Then there is Circle of 6, which won the 2011 Apps Against Abuse challenge sponsored by the Obama Administration and works by offering users a number of icons that send the user’s selected ‘circle’ messages for help, interruption, or advice.

Originally designed to guard against date rapes in the United States, the app’s developers saw a 1,000-percent rise in the number of downloads in India after the Nirbhaya tragedy, prompting them to translate the app into Hindi and tailor it to fit the Indian context.

According to Circle of 6–New Delhi, the app has been programmed in both English and Hindi and it has been designed in a gender-neutral manner.

Says Nancy Schwartzman, a representative of the team who created Circle of 6, “Administrations should make Circle of 6 a priority and should invest in the future of safety with this technology. Circle of 6 is […] a smart and efficient way to centralize both social and emergency communications.”

The app creators said the hotlines have been pre-programmed so that they are in sync with the 24/7 women’s hotline of New Delhi and the women counseling and support service run by the NGO Jagori.

A user of the app, who feels uneasy to contact the police, can also reach out to the Lawyer’s Collective, a leading public interest legal service provider.

Government gets on board

Taking its cue from private initiatives by IT firms and advocacy groups, the government is now pouring resources into the issue of women’s safety.

Under former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the finance ministry approved proposals aimed at streamlining police, mobile and legal services in the country, resulting in the creation of a fund worth one trillion rupees (about 16 billion dollars) to be used exclusively on projects aimed at enhancing women’s safety.

For example, a proposal by the ministry of home affairs, designed in consultation with the ministry of information technology, calls for integration of the police administration with the mobile phone network to rapidly trace and respond to distress calls.

The ministry of information technology also plans to issue instructions to all mobile phone manufacturers to introduce a mandatory SOS alert button to all handsets.

The scheme will be launched in 157 cities in two phases.

Yet another project – known in its initial stage as ‘design and development of an affordable electronic personal safety device’ – being undertaken by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) aims to roll out a self-contained safety system in the form of a wristwatch.

India’s ministry of road transport and highways has proposed a scheme that will cover 32 towns, each with a population of over one million people, where public transportation vehicles will be fitted with GPS tracking devices to enhance law enforcement’s ability to respond to attacks.

Still, an app alone cannot solve the massive problem of violence against women in India, with an average of 57 cases of rape reported every day, according to an analysis of government data by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI).

According to Jasmeen Patheja, founder of a student-led project at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore known as Blank Noise, the “solution is not in the app itself, but its function and role and space for intervention.”

But Rimi B. Chatterjee, a writer and activist based in Kolkata who also teaches English in the prestigious Jadavpur University, which is leading a viral protest against the molestation of a girl student on campus in September this year, is skeptical about the effectiveness of the apps.

“I am personally not sure about their efficacy and I fear that they can actually be launched by companies to bank on the insecurity of women to make money. So I have never advised my students to use them,” says Chatterjee.

“The solution to women’s safety is in the counselling and training of men and not in development of apps. The problem is not with the women, it lies with men and their mindset, as young men are learning to disrespect women from their seniors,” she says.

However, according to Faruqui, an app like the one to be launched in connection with the 181 Helpline on Nov. 25, on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the aim will be to address the gaps in the existing apps and ensure that a woman in distress can find timely assistance.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

A woman is attacked by police at an anti-rape protest in New Delhi. Credit: Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI)

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 8 2013 (IPS)

Harsh police handling of public protests erupting across India over a spate of sensational rapes since December has resulted in renewed demands to reform a force that retains the repressive features of its colonial origins.

Last month a bench of the Supreme Court, angered by police brutality on women protesting against rapes in the capital, New Delhi, and other north Indian states, demanded to know the status of compliance with rulings the apex court had made on police reforms six years ago.

“Even an animal won’t do what the police officers are doing everyday in different parts of the country,” the bench said, referring, among other things, to the beating up by police of a 65-year-old woman who had joined protests against rape in Aligarh, a city in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. “How can police officers beat an unarmed lady?”

Justice G.S. Singhvi, leading the bench, singled out the case of a police officer slapping a young woman participating in protests on Apr. 19 outside a Delhi hospital where a five-year-old girl was being treated for serious injuries inflicted on her by her rapist in the Gandhi Nagar area of the capital.

“The police can do little to reduce crimes like rape, but they should be judged by how they react to such crimes,” said Jyotiswaroop Pandey, who retired last year as director-general of police in the northern Uttarakhand state and is currently a member of the police reforms commission.

Pandey told IPS that it was “unacceptable” that police failed to react to complaints of misbehaviour against a bus driver on Dec. 16, 2012.  Hours later, the driver and his crew were arrested for the gang rape and brutalisation of a 23-year-old woman passenger.

The victim and her male companion were flung off the bus and left lying in a busy Delhi street naked and bleeding for almost an hour with no passer-by daring to intervene for fear of getting embroiled in a lengthy police case.

As public protests grew, authorities moved the young woman to a Singapore hospital where she succumbed to her grievous injuries on Dec. 29. In Delhi, police resorted to water cannons, baton charges and mass arrests as protesters surged towards parliament.

Commenting on the rough treatment of protesters, Pandey said the police had “forgotten that their primary focus should have been on maintaining peace and order without resorting to force or behaviour likely to exacerbate tensions when an empathetic attitude could have quietened tempers.”

Even more than the brutal repression on the streets, rights activists are concerned with the way rape victims are treated at police stations, starting with refusals to record complaints.

In December, the victim of a gang rape in Patiala, Punjab state, committed suicide by consuming poison after leaving behind a note charging police with failing to act on her complaint and, instead, intimidating her.

Soon after she was raped by three men, the victim had appeared on television channels describing her ordeal, but that failed to rouse the police. Even after the suicide it took intervention by the Punjab high court before authorities moved to sack three policemen and initiate criminal proceedings against them.

In a press note released on Apr. 23, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), a major non-government organisation that is pushing for police reforms, expressed “serious concern at the continuing lack of response to victims of rape.”

CHRI said evidence of this failure could be seen in the way police handled the case of a five-year-old girl who was kidnapped and raped in Delhi last month.

Instead of registering the missing person complaint, police “simply drove the distraught parents away,” the CHRI press note said, adding that policemen even offered a bribe to prevent the family from taking their story to the media.

Even the new rape laws, which threaten police officers who refuse to record a complaint of rape with a two-year jail sentence, seem to have done nothing to change attitudes and behaviours, said CHRI Director Maja Daruwala.

The new law, drawn up after wide consultations with civil society, takes into consideration current thinking on gender issues and existing patriarchal attitudes in society to modify ideas ingrained in the Indian Penal Code that was introduced by the British colonial regime in 1860.

Recent events show that the law, passed by parliament on Mar. 20, is yet to kick in. “Changes in law brought about after the Dec.16 rape have little meaning if the police continue to defeat justice through their…subversive practices,” Daruwala said.

Also, while the changes provide for quicker trials and harsher punishments for rapists, they have been criticised for completely overlooking the burning need to modernise the police force to make it service-oriented rather than repressive, as desired by the Supreme Court.

“If the 2006 directives of the Supreme Court were adopted and implemented they could have transformed the police from a feared and distrusted force into an essential service upholding the law,” says Navaz Kotwal, coordinator of CHRI’s police reforms programme.

On Mar. 6, alerted by reports in the media of the police’s repeated high-handedness in dealing with anti-rape protests, the Supreme Court issued notices to the provinces to report on progress in implementing reforms.

But senior police officers are sceptical. “Even though the apex court has not given up its monitoring, the present bunch of police reforms is already a futile exercise,” says Vikash Narain Rai, former director-general of police in the northern Haryana state.

Rai told IPS that if police reforms are to be successful they need to be accompanied by “judicial reforms, an overhaul of correctional services and real empowerment of society.”

Rai regrets that the emphasis remains on “flexing state muscles through increased retribution and protectionism, essentially by-products of male chauvinism, rather than on sensitising criminal justice functionaries and empowering women.”