Men, it's time to step up to help women feel safe in public spaces. Here's how to do it

Let’s start with a few horrifying statistics. More than 70% of women in the UK say they’ve experienced sexual harassment in public spaces and over 95% of women aren’t reporting it because they don’t believe it will change anything.

One in 12 women in England and Wales have experienced stalking, harassment, sexual assault or domestic violence. In the UK, a woman is killed by a man every three days.

These numbers are harrowing but perhaps not surprising. Almost every woman knows what it’s like to walk home with their keys between their fingers, phone in hand, glancing behind every 10 seconds.

• One in five Brits say they’ve sofa surfed amid record levels of homelessness heading into Christmas
• ‘There was no way out’: Survivors of domestic abuse forced to stay with abusers or face destitution

While harassment and gendered violence can be experienced by all, Black and Brown women, LGBTQ+ people, refugee and disabled women all face disproportionate levels of gendered violence. The fear that women feel in public places has become so common that many of us consider it a fact of life.

When you don’t feel safe – whether it’s on your journey home, at your place of work or in a public space – your movements are restricted. Your life gets smaller. More than this, our fear is grounded in the knowledge that harassment can precede assault or even murder.

We need urgent action. Building on our Safe Spaces Now campaign, UN Women UK has launched Right to Move, a national behavioural change campaign that aims to empower us all, especially men, to help women feel safer in public spaces, particularly as the days get darker and the nights get longer.

Creating safer public spaces requires a whole-systems approach across law enforcement, government, business and through community mobilisation. We can often feel hopeless and helpless in the face of these big issues, but the truth is that we can all play our part in creating a safer and more equal world.

As a bystander (someone who might witness harassment firsthand or who is subsequently informed of the incident) we can move from a passive state to an active state, without putting our own personal safety at risk, by adopting the ‘stop, support, report’ mindset.

Stop and offer your help (focus on the person not the perpetrator). For example, you could create a distraction by stopping to ask for directions or make eye contact with the target and give them the opportunity to ask you for help.
‌
Support the person to safety (check what would make them feel safe, walk them to the bus/train, call a taxi, wait with them until a friend arrives).

Report it, but only if they want to (this could be calling 999, texting British Transport Police on 61016 or reporting it to the security or management team of the event or space).

Active bystander intervention is a crucial part of the solution, because when we intervene, we signal to the perpetrator that their behaviour is unacceptable. If this message is constantly reinforced within our communities and our workplaces, we can shift the boundaries of what is considered acceptable.

Women shouldn’t bear the responsibility to protect themselves in public spaces. It’s on all of us to change our behaviour and look out for those around us to help defuse situations, discourage harassers, and support victims.

UN Women UK has created a suite of tools and actionable steps accessible to everyone. We have also expanded our efforts to address sexual harassment in the workplace, in alignment with the new UK employment rights bill which came into force in October 2024, calling on employers to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace.

This is an urgent frontier for women’s rights. We all have the right to go about daily life in peace and safety. We all have a duty to act now.

You can find more information on the Right to Move campaign here.

Tabitha Morton is executive director of UN Women UK.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. This Christmas, you can make a lasting change on a vendor’s life. Buy a magazine from your local vendor in the street every week. If you can’t reach them, buy a Vendor Support Kit.