Introduction

In 2012, Safecity.in devised an innovative solution to shed light on a persistent problem: the sexual harassment and assault of individuals—mostly, but certainly not entirely women—in public places. This is one of several phenomena categorized as a “dark figure of crime” (Biderman and Reiss, 1967; Coleman and Moynihan, 1996). These are crimes that tend to be markedly underreported in official statistics, and these unreported incidents can impede our understanding of all types of crime in many parts of the world where bribery of police may be required just to report a crime or where professionalization standards governing policing are still emergent. But such underreporting is rampant globally in the case of sensitive crimes that carry with them a significant stigma even for the victim (Kamruzzaman, 2016). Safecity.in developed a mechanism by which any individual on the planet could anonymously share having experienced an incident of sexual harassment or assault on a singular global platform so that the incident would then be mapped on a global interface using Ushahidi.com's revolutionary approach to crowdsourcing data from members of the public. In our case, a primary goal was to expand our understanding of the locational aspects of genderbased violence as place has increasingly become a unit of analysis for better understanding of criminal incidents and behaviors (Meares, 1997; Weisbunr et al. 2008). Within a few years, an app was developed to enhance and expand upon the web-based reporting platform, and it has been shared in many different communities so that people in more places can make reports. When enough people report in a concentrated area, hot spots of activity can be identified.

In the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and the eruption of Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and, now, globally, we have had to pivot the use of our platform so as to better incorporate and represent broader aspects of safety in public places as they relate to gender-based violence: that is, including (1) reporting on domestic violence as this becomes more of a public problem as more women and children are forced to shelter in place with possible abusers;