Women’s Mobility and the Situational Conditions of Rape: Cases Reported to Hospitals

What is it about?

The article looks at what happens before a rape event and assess how these past situational conditions (place, social interactions and activity) affect women's risk to be victimised by rape. Visualisation techniques and modelling are used to achieve this aim using a sample of women who reported rape to hospitals. Results show that different types of social interactions and activities during the hours before rape have a distinct impact of the risk of being raped. Place too has an effect. Being in streets have a protective effect while being close to a public transportation increases the risk for rape.

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Why is it important?

This article makes a contribution to a better understanding of situational conditions of rape. If we know more about these conditions, we hope we can better prevent these events. However, we still know little about violence against women in public spaces—from sexual harassment to rape—an these events are an everyday occurrence for women and girls around the world, in urban and rural areas, and in developed and developing countries (UN Women, 2014). This violence happens on streets, on public transport and in parks, and in and around schools and workplaces or in familiar places, such as the victims’ neighborhoods. This reality affects women’s freedom of movement and their health and well-being. In addition to the practical difficulties of ensuring safety for women using a whole journey perspective, there are important issues that are of more structural nature and perhaps lie outside the scope of this article, namely, expected sexual behavior of boys and girls and taboos in sex education in modern multicultural societies.

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