Do Personal Safety Alarms Actually Make Women Safer? | Mini Episode

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Faye Bate (0:30)

We're going to play a little game called Bye or Bye Bye.

I'm going to show you something. And I would love to know whether you would buy this thing or you would say bye bye to it. There's only one rule. We love nuance. If you want to give balance, you're welcome to. If you also want to say get in the bin right now, you're welcome to. Personal safety alarms.

Amy Watson (0:48)

Can I give the nuance now?

Faye Bate (0:50)

Yeah. Give nuance. It's not like phone of friends. You can use the nuance on everyone.

Amy Watson (0:55)

Okay. I would say, I would say with all personal safety stuff, and I feel like it's going to apply to a lot of these. If on an individual level, it makes you feel safer, do what you need to do. This problem isn't solved overnight.

I think that way more time and energy needs to be put into prevention. But if there are things that you need to do in the short term, the only problem is with a lot of personal safety things. They either don't work, make you more unsafe. If you go to court, they can be used against you. So many different things like that.

Faye Bate (1:22)

What do you mean if you go to court, they can be used against you?

Amy Watson (1:25)

You can get those personal key chains. They've got different tools on them, right? Instead of carrying the keys between your fingers. But again, it can be like you are carrying a weapon. So then, like in a lot of cases, if you're carrying a weapon, you have some form of violent intentions.

So there's this whole thing. And I mean, even like personal safety alarms, like, yes, they can work, but what if they could make the person more angry and no one around could even hear them? And this is why I'm like, I'm not against them, but they're so complicated in terms of they're not just like, oh, they're going to make you safer.

Faye Bate (2:04)

And I'd imagine we don't have research and data into how these personal safety features play out in real life. Like I can't imagine there's research into how an attacker actually reacts if a personal safety alarm is pressed and they're trying to attack you, you know?

Amy Watson (2:22)

I think it's something that's very, very hard to collect data on and like quantify, right? I mean, I know there was one, I want to say it was in France, but I might be wrong, where it's like an app where if you're in danger, you can press something and any woman within a certain radius gets an alert, so they come and there was a case where they came and the woman was dead, I want to say, but I'm pretty sure that was a story, but otherwise they wouldn't have found her body because the women went and found her. But also all of these apps then like that, great idea in theory, apart from the fact that it puts way more responsibility on women, but also men can pretend to be women, to use, what's the vetting process? I know there was quite strict ID checks and all this kind of stuff, but I know I was talking to one of our ambassadors and she's in Canada and she was saying like they have this buddy system where like you can request a buddy to help you home, but also is that also prone to violent perpetrators abusing it?

So we went to the Met and they did like a whole day basically on technology that's being manipulated for, and they were saying things down to like, what's it called, like the weather, what are they called? The little things. Yeah, like that people were tapping into them to monitor people, like seeing when they were in the house, like air pods, they were dropping air pods to track where they were going, like when their kids were like, like all of this stuff is just, technology is amazing, but also it never solves a problem. This is the thing, they all just plaster, even if they help temporarily or in the moment. And I'm not saying, I think it's just very individual, right? In terms of like how you feel in that moment. But personally, it doesn't make me feel safer. Like there's definitely things I do, like I ring my mom if I'm on my own and things like that. And I would choose like a taxi on an app rather than just like calling in the street or whatever. So I definitely think there are things, but it's just, again, it's like we spend so much money inventing all of these ways for women to keep themselves safe. But if men are getting more and more violent or even if men are just remaining as violent as they are, it doesn't stop it, you know? It just plasters, like it's good. It's well-intentioned. Like I think this about all of these things. I don't think, you know, people out there making safety devices are, I mean, maybe some, but like a lot of people are well-intentioned. It comes from personal experience, whatever. But it's just, every time I'm like...