Crime against women in public space: a case of study of Kolkata

Abstract

Gender is one of the predominant component of human society. Since history of the mankind society has been divided into three gender- male, Female and Transgender. This is not only a biological phenomenon but gender also has social and cultural characteristics attached to it. The history of human civilization has always talked about how over years and decades females are been vulnerable to crime against them especially gender crime. From medieval era war to today’s political uprising women has always experienced crime against them. Rape, Molestation, Honour Killing, Forced Abortion and what not. Whenever people wanted to show their power and wanted to rule over society, gender crime has always been the medium of showing power and force. It has been taken decade that women got their basic rights like right to vote, right to divorce and right to work as a part of work force of an economy. With the gradual change in the mindset of people and nation crime against women become a very important and vivid reason of discussion over countries and when United Nation came up with the Sustainable Development Goal then Gender safety became one of the prime goal to achieve. Different global and national programme came up all over the world for decreasing the crime against women. But the ground level scenario is very different in reality. The crime against women sees no decline and women continue to suffer. India, with a history of strong matriarchal society, now have a high degree of crime against women in both urban and rural areas. Constant news of different violent and non-violent crime against women is putting India in a bad situation in terms of gender crime in all over the world. This is predominantly because of social and cultural scenario prevailing in the country but not the only reason. One of the very strong reason behind such increment in crime against women is absence of gender inclusive Planning. Now being a developing country India is experience major changes in terms of infrastructure, economy and society and in case of planning for these developmental events gender identity has never been incorporated which creates a scenario where in spite of having modern facilities infrastructure women perceive threat, especially in Public Spaces. Spaces like Park, Plaza, Garden has less number of female user than Movie Hall and Shopping centres and malls as the security is higher and the perception of threat is much lower. But if these remain the case then half of the population of any city will choose not to use most of the facilities available around the urban space and will lead to failure of the infrastructures. Kolkata, one of the metropolitan cities in India comes third in terms of women safety and crime behind Department of Planning, School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal (MP)-462 030 Bangalore and NCR. This shows that even this city is becoming very much prone to crime against women and hence there is a possibility of having huge change in the behaviour and usage of the public space of women in this city. Through this thesis it is tried to be seen that what factors are impacting upon the safety of women in public space and how through different planning and design intervention this scenario can be changed so that more inclusive urban planning comes into being. For the study Jadavpur Police Station area has been considered in South Suburban Division as it is a newly included police station under Kolkata Police and has a good mosaic of residential, commercial and institutional land use. The entire area has been studied through primary and expert opinion survey and tried to find out which are the places or pockets which are more prone to crime against women and why women are perceiving threat against them in this area, what are the factors that is instigating the perception among them and what are the alternative places and routes they are taking to avoid those places or areas. Through analysis it has been seen that six pockets of the entire area are comparatively unsafe for women and the reasons behind this perception is social, functional, atmospheric and infrastructural facilities of those pockets like lighting, surveillance gendered usage of space, arrangement of space, distance from public transport etc. Hence through this study it is tried that how through planning and design intervention these critical neighbourhoods can be changed into more safe for women so that the usage of space increase and more inclusive urban space gets created.