Why Women Still Can't Walk Alone: A Global Safety Audit

The Geography of Fear

Every woman knows the route. Not the shortest route, not the most scenic route, but the safest route. She calculates it automatically, the way a driver calculates traffic: which streets are well-lit, which stretches have CCTV cameras, which neighbourhoods have shops open late, which underpasses to avoid entirely. This calculation is so internalised that most women do not even recognise it as a skill—one they were forced to learn, and one no man of equivalent age and physical build has ever needed.

The inability to walk alone safely is not a cultural quirk or a personal anxiety. It is a global structural condition that restricts women's freedom of movement in every country on earth. The degree varies—from the relative safety of Scandinavian cities to the near-total restriction of movement in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan—but the phenomenon is universal. **No country on earth has achieved genuine gender parity in the right to move freely through public space.**

This is not an accident. The restriction of women's movement is one of patriarchy's oldest and most effective tools. A woman who cannot walk alone is a woman who cannot participate fully in public life—who cannot attend late meetings, who cannot take night classes, who cannot explore her city, who cannot have the spontaneous, unplanned experiences that constitute a free life.

**"Freedom begins at the threshold. If a woman cannot leave her door without calculating risk, she is not free."** — Prof. Urvashi Butalia, feminist historian

The Indian Paradox

India presents one of the world's most striking paradoxes on women's safety. It is a country with a female prime minister's legacy, millions of working women, vibrant feminist movements, and constitutional guarantees of gender equality. It is also a country where women face extraordinary levels of sexual violence, harassment, and restriction of movement.

The statistics are grim and well-documented. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) reported **445,256 cases of crimes against women in 2024**, a 4% increase from the previous year. Street harassment is near-universal: a 2024 survey by the Thomson Reuters Foundation found that **94% of Indian women reported being harassed in public space in the past year**. And the actual figures are certainly higher, as the vast majority of incidents go unreported.

Indian women's movement is constrained in ways that are both visible and invisible. The visible constraints are the curfews, the prohibitions on going out alone, the mandatory accompaniment by male relatives. The invisible constraints are subtler but equally powerful: the internalised fear that makes a woman decline a night shift, the social pressure that makes her avoid certain neighbourhoods, the economic calculation that makes her choose a lower-paying job closer to home.

The response to high-profile cases—Nirbhaya in 2012, Hathras in 2020, and numerous others—has been a cycle of outrage, promises, and inaction. New laws are passed. CCTV cameras are installed. Women's helpdesks are announced. And then the system reverts to its default setting: **blame the woman for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.**

**"After every rape, they tell women to carry pepper spray. After every murder, they tell women to share their location. The burden of prevention is always on the victim."** — Activist Kavita Krishna, Delhi

Global Patterns of Restriction

The restriction of women's movement takes different forms across cultures, but the underlying logic is consistent: women's bodies are territories to be controlled, and movement through public space is a form of exposure that must be managed.

In **Saudi Arabia**, women gained the right to drive only in 2018, and the male guardianship system still restricts women's travel without male permission. Despite reforms, a 2025 Human Rights Watch report found that **women who travel without male permission face arrest, imprisonment, and forced return to their families.**

In **Japan**, women face a distinct form of movement restriction: the expectation of hyper-awareness in public transport. A 2024 survey by the Japan Organization for Global Human Resource Development found that **89% of Japanese women reported adjusting their behaviour—avoiding eye contact, sitting in specific carriages, wearing headphones as decoys—to manage the risk of groping on trains.** The restriction is not legal but social: women must navigate male violence by modifying their own behaviour.

In **Mexico**, women's movement is constrained by femicide. In 2024, **3,892 women were killed in gender-based violence**, according to the National Public Security System. The response has included women-only buses, women-only train carriages, and feminist collectives that accompany women walking at night. The creation of separate infrastructure is an admission of systemic failure: **public space is not safe, and the state cannot or will not make it safe.**

In **Afghanistan**, the Taliban's restrictions represent the most extreme form of movement control. Women are prohibited from attending secondary school and university, from working in most sectors, from visiting parks and gyms, and from travelling more than 70 kilometres without a male guardian. A 2025 UN report estimated that **women in Afghanistan are confined to their homes for an average of 22 hours per day.**

**"The measure of a country's commitment to women's rights is not what its laws say but what its streets allow."** — Report, UN Women, 2025

The Myth of "Safe" Countries

The conversation about women's safety is often framed as a divide between "safe" Western countries and "unsafe" developing nations. This framing is both inaccurate and self-serving. It allows Western countries to congratulate themselves on their progress while ignoring the violence that persists within their borders, and it allows developing nations to dismiss safety concerns as "Western imports."

The reality is that no country is safe. **Sweden**, often held up as a model of gender equality, has one of the highest rates of reported sexual violence in Europe—though advocates argue this partly reflects higher reporting rates. **The United Kingdom** recorded **400,000 cases of sexual assault in 2024**, according to the Office for National Statistics. **Australia's** 2024 National Safety Survey found that **one in three women** had experienced physical or sexual violence since the age of 15.

The difference between countries is not the absence of violence but the **response to it**. Countries with lower rates of gender-based violence typically share certain characteristics: robust public services for survivors, police forces trained in gender-sensitive investigation, legal systems that take women's reports seriously, and cultural norms that hold perpetrators accountable rather than blaming victims.

India lacks most of these characteristics. The conviction rate for rape cases is approximately **27%**. The average time for case resolution is **5-7 years**. Police training on gender-based violence is minimal and inconsistent. And cultural attitudes—victim-blaming, honour-shaming, family pressure to withdraw cases—remain deeply entrenched.

Reclaiming Public Space

The feminist response to the restriction of women's movement must go beyond safety measures. Pepper spray and self-defence classes address symptoms, not causes. The cause is a public sphere designed by and for men—a space where women's presence is conditional, conditional on their visibility being "appropriate," their behaviour being "respectable," and their risk being "acceptable."

Reclaiming public space means **demanding that cities be designed for women's safety**: well-lit streets, accessible public transport, safe waiting areas, functional emergency response systems. It means **holding governments accountable** for the gap between their promises and their delivery. It means **refusing the narrative that women's safety is a private problem** to be solved by individual women's caution.

**"I don't want my daughter to learn self-defence. I want her to live in a world where she doesn't need it."** — Mother, Hyderabad

The right to walk alone—to move freely through public space without fear, without calculation, without modification—is not a luxury. It is a prerequisite for full citizenship. And until every woman on earth can exercise it, the promise of gender equality remains a conditional offer, revoked at the first dark street corner.