Developing Gender Safety Audit Toolkit (GSAT)

Young women and men need to be involved in violence prevention on an equal basis, but their specific security needs and sources of their insecurity need to be taken into consideration separately. Statistics in Serbia show that out of total annual number of victims of crimes in Serbia young people make between 22% and 28% of all victims (16,500 -18,000 young persons). In the period from 2008 to 2013 almost half of victims of violent crimes against life and body were young people (46%), while 49% of rape victims were also young people.

In order to provide a comprehensive response to young women’s and men’s safety in local community it is crucial to map and analyze sources of insecurity for young women and men in public spaces. The first step in doing so is to develop a specific methodology – a gender safety audit – which will capture and incorporate the level and sense of insecurity in public places among young women and men. For this purpose, a Gender Safety Audit Toolkit (GSAT) that will provide a step-by-step guidance for conducting safety audits in local communities in Serbia will be developed.

The GSAT will enable local civil society organizations (CSOs) and local institutions (local safety councils, local gender equality councils) to collect and analyze information about main sources of insecurity for young women and men, concrete locations in the community where they feel unsafe and situations in which they are vulnerable or in security risk.

The GSAT will be developed through applied research: desk research; focus groups with young women and men from the local community and interviews with representatives of local authorities, the police, etc. Focus groups and interviews will enable development of the methodology for gender safety audits that will take in the account local context (social and political surroundings, institutional setup at the local level, competences of local authorities for local safety, etc.). The aim of the methodology is also to allow for action oriented research. It will also be participatory, allowing the target group (young women and men) to share their experiences of insecurity in local community.