Whenever Poppy goes out, it always ends the same way: with an app called Find My Friends.
“Me and about five of my – mainly female – best friends have it and we all check it when the other one comes home if we’ve been hanging out. Sometimes on dates too; it just makes us feel safer,” the 25-year-old says. The app, which allows users to track and monitor the whereabouts of their best friends, is a go-to for many women – and it’s easy to see why.
“We travel a lot from East London to the South, which means we spend a lot of time waiting on street corners for buses, which can be quite scary in the early hours.”
And that’s not so strange: friends of mine have been followed home many times, tried to wave off men who were a little too interested in conversation, avoided curious people on public transport and been pushed back and forth – even once out of the metro and onto the platform.
“In college, a guy tried to push me down an alleyway when I was coming back from the gym,” Poppy says. “It’s so annoying, it really irritates me, that I’m paying the same bus or subway fare as a guy and he’s making it unsafe for me to be there: tons of stuff, rubbing, staring, spreading.”
It’s an experience many can relate to, myself included. “Text me when you get home!” friends say, along with hugs as they part; at 2am my WhatsApp group chat lights up with messages confirming that they have indeed arrived home safely.
And while thankfully nothing happened to us, the same cannot be said for all of London – or even the rest of the country.
Being a woman in the UK is dangerous. Between 2017 and 2023, incidents of violence against women and girls rose by 40 per cent, leading one police chief to call it a “national emergency”. In the same report, police estimated that one in 12 women are victims of rape, domestic abuse, stalking or harassment each year.
That’s 2 million victims a year. No wonder it’s been called an “epidemic” and those are just the reported numbers.
While Find My Friends is useful, it can only do so much. And in a world where distrust of the police is greater than ever, new initiatives – many of them women-led – are springing up to provide a service that ranges from reporting crimes to keeping someone company on the way home.
One of these is WalkSafe, a free-to-use app that shows users a map of crimes that have occurred in a given area, so they can choose a safer route home. Founder Emma Kay set up the app as a passion project following the kidnapping and murder of Sarah Everard by police officer Wayne Couzens in 2021.
“I am someone with a lot of life experience,” she says.[I experienced] a lot when I walked to and from school. From the age of 12, [there was] a lot of sexual harassment. There was a seedy park we had to go through and we had people masturbating in the bushes, we had people following us.”
Today, WalkSafe has expanded its offering to help users of all genders identify “safe spaces” in the environment they find themselves in.
These could be pubs that have an active Ask for Angela program, bars whose staff have received active bystander training, or places that offer free phone charging in case you run out of battery and need to call for help. The app even allows other app users to track the whereabouts of their trusted friends, and sends them an automatic alert if they don’t reach their intended destination in time.
It’s no surprise that it caught on. When they started, Kay says, “there was so much distrust of the police in London [and] women felt so unsafe that we probably saw half a million downloads in the first 10 days since we started. And now we’ve had over a million.”
One new feature she’s excited to share with you is WalkSafe’s new crime reporting feature. This allows users to anonymously report crimes to the police. WalkSafe is now working with them, despite initial reluctance from the police.
“They were saying something like, ‘Users should come to us first,’” Kay says, but their tone quickly changed; possibly because they realized that women still weren’t coming forward to report crimes.
“I think there’s a lack of trust in certain areas where they’re in the news at the moment,” Kay says. “The tide is turning for them, but I think we’ve got a long way to go.”
But it’s not just WalkSafe: other apps are popping up to fill the void left by police. There’s The Sorority, a French app that’s now launched worldwide, which allows women to log their location in any place they feel unsafe, and alert other users to their cry for help.
Then there’s Strut Safe, which operates in Edinburgh, London and a growing number of towns in the Midlands. Walk around Hackney and you’ll see Strut Safe stickers plastered all over lampposts and bus stops.
It works like a telephone hotline: anyone, regardless of gender, can call it on their way back from a night out and be put in touch with one of the team’s trained volunteers, who will provide company on the journey home. Rho Chung, one of the initiative’s co-founders, says the team usually takes “a dozen, or a couple of dozen” calls during a night out: so far this year they’ve taken 500 calls.
“No one has ever been attacked while on the phone with us, thankfully,” they say; although they have never had to escalate a call, their volunteers are all trained in how to deal with extreme situations. While operators encourage people to call 999 of their own accord, they do so on behalf of the caller as a last resort.
“We know that’s a possibility. People call us when the threat level is quite low; when someone has just been catcalled or when something has just happened. We’ve had some really great feedback from people who often name specific volunteers that they’ve spoken to… all the way to people saying that they believe Strut Safe saved their life.”
And for nights out, there’s the recently launched Where You At. Created by 24-year-old Tamzin Lent after a “horrible” experience in a club, the app has teamed up with major venues such as Drumsheds in London to create a map of the club’s floor plan.
With a bit of technological wizardry, app users can then see exactly where their friends are within that space. Lent hopes this will take the stress out of a night out. However, the app also plans to extend the service to festivals.
“The idea was mainly, how can I build something that allows people to have a great, fun night out, where they feel empowered to wander around… and go dancing and go to another room?” Lent says.
“[Where] you shouldn’t be with your friends all the time. You should have more freedom.”
And the sad truth is that we need initiatives like this more than ever. Both Strut Safe and WalkSafe have reported spikes in usage following high profile cases like Sarah Everard’s.
“I desperately want to make a difference, but it’s hard and it’s a two-faced thing,” Kay admits when I ask her what she thinks of WalkSafe’s success.
“I always say the app shouldn’t exist. We love that we’re there to support and help, but when you see high-profile cases like Sabina Nessa and Zara Aleena, we usually see an uptick in downloads. I mean, with Sabina Nessa we had 5,000 in a weekend.
“The call to action is there, and it’s really disheartening,” she says. “It just makes you really sad that we still feel so unsafe.”
One thing is for sure: these apps aren’t going away, and neither is the demand for a safe way to travel home at night. But at least people are taking action, and at least the police are taking note.
“It’s really interesting that the landscape is totally changing and evolving now and people are coming together to help,” Kay concludes. Let’s hope we see change soon.
For more information about Strut Safe, click here here
For more information about WalkSafe, click here here
For more information about Where You At, click here