New Delhi-based charity Whypoll is set to release its Fight Back mobile app for BlackBerry and Nokia mobile phones in India, in an attempt to counter the growing problem of women being harassed and sexually assaulted in the country’s capital, according to a Reuters report.
Fight Back will allow targeted women to immediately send out an SOS via text message to five people, including the local police, and post it on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. If the phone has GPS, the messages will include its location as well, in order to assist others in reaching the scene of the crime.
Furthermore, the app will keep track of the locations in the city where the crimes occur and help the charity organisers chart out an accurate map of which areas of the Indian capital are most unsafe for women.
It is scheduled to be launched in November this year and will be available from the Whypoll website at a small price. The SOS messages sent out in the form of text messages will be charged as per the user’s tariff plan.
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Although the subjugation of women in a male-dominated society is a common problem throughout India, incidents of catcalls, lurid comments, stalking, indecent exposure and sexual assault are highest in New Delhi. There is one rape every eighteen hours in the capital city, according to local police.
According to statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau, incidences of rape in India have increased significantly in the past 40 years, with 21,397 cases having been reported in 2009, a 760% increase over the 2,487 cases reported in 1971. And that’s before even accounting for the fact that most women subjected to sexual assaults in India are too ashamed of the incident to report it to the authorities.
Whypoll has been aggressively fighting against this abominable crime and has in the past few months polled ten thousand New Delhi residents to create an “(un)safe map of Delhi” to warn residents of the city of its most perversely inclined areas. It has also released a list of the top 100 most unsafe places in New Delhi and allows victims of sexual crimes to report those incidents on its website.
[Image courtesy of Warren Goldswain / Shutterstock.com.]
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