Community members will gather on a specified date and time to:

1. Conduct an onsite tour of a physical space, or
2. Participate in a community conversation about the ways they experience safety in public spaces in Hamilton

During the event, community members will capture their observations, perspectives, and ideas using and a checklist of matters of consider and data collection forms provided by the audit organizer.

Contact us at gbsahamilton@gmail.com and we will send you an audit event planning form that you can complete alone or with other community members. We recommend that you plan an audit event with at least one other person. Two heads can be better than one.

Once we’ve received your form, we will contact you to provide you with feedback, support, and a safety audit event kit so that you have the tools to collect the data on your event day.

Absolutely, all safety audit event organizers will be connected to a community support team member who can provide moral support, access to financial resources and/or skilled facilitators, etc.

Onsite tour audit participants will receive materials to assist and then have a discussion about–. Part of any audit is discussing the physical and social aspects that make a physical space safe like lighting, surveillance, sightlines, and general attitudes and behaviours of the community members, businesses, and organizations that share the space (rephrased, source).

GBSAs can be used to help community members, business leaders, and City officials answer important questions related to the extent that gender impacts the way people can navigate physical spaces safely.

Women and gender-diverse individuals face different and often increased safety risks in various community spaces than cis-gendered men. In 2023, Hamilton joined several cities across Ontario to declare gender-based violence to be an epidemic. The statistics gathered by the Women Abuse Working Group are sobering: there were 7,660 crisis or helpline calls recorded last year related to gender-based violence, and 2,061 women in Hamilton received violence against women counseling.

After conversing with other women-serving organizations, YWCA Hamilton, a local leader in programs and services for women and gender-diverse individuals, discovered:

• A lack of data around what types of violence women and gender-diverse individuals were experiencing
• Many incidents of violence against women and gender-diverse individuals at street level making targeting solutions difficult
• An increase in violence against women and gender-diverse individuals during the pandemic (in line with historical evidence showing a pattern of increase gender-based violence during epidemics)
• Several organizations facing similar challenges around creating safe(r) spaces for women and gender-diverse individuals

The GBSA is designed to close the gap of documented understanding about the physical and social safety needs of women, gender-diverse people, and children in Hamilton’s public spaces.

Women and gender-diverse individuals who are Indigenous, racialized, disabled, elderly, identify as LGBTQ+, and/or coping with homelessness are disproportionately at risk of experiencing violence in public spaces. It is therefore important to apply a gender-based lens to creating safer spaces. We like the way a team of gender and place practitioners at Monash University explain it:

Women from different racial backgrounds and of different ages, sexuality, disabilities and socio-economic class have very different experiences. Indeed, one woman’s experience of a place as “bad” might be contradicted by another’s account of the same location.

This means we must also consider how women’s differing and intersecting identities shape their individual and collective experiences – and thus perceptions of safety in public space.

Understanding these complex experiences for women in greater depth means gathering more gender-specific data. Right now, we have far too little data about women’s experiences and knowledge. Or, rather, the information is in a format that is too general and too easily dismissed.

(rephrased, source)

The auditing team is committed to working with communities in ways that centre their data sovereignty. This means that:

• We believe women, youth, and gender-diverse communities are experts in their own lives;
• We honour participants’ decisions to contribute their ideas and wisdom to the audit;
• Communities who participate in the gender-based safety audit own and retain their data.
• Participants are invited to exercise their power of choice about when they share data, how they share data, and who has access to that data; and
• All information gathered and shared from participants will be grouped to make the information less identifiable.

On a practical level, this means that:

• Participants can receive a copy of the data they have shared.
• Participants and community members at large will be invited to participate in the audit data meaning-making process.
• Participants and community members will be invited to review and
  comment on the draft report.
• Community members will have access to the final report

The YWCA has been commissioned by the City of Hamilton to complete this GBSA because there is a desire and intention to create a greater sense of physical and emotional safety and decrease incidents of crime/violence against women, girls, and gender-diverse people. We can’t predict what will occur after the audit report is submitted, however, what we do know is:

• the GBSA is meant to support the Community Safety and Well-Being (CSWB) Plan developed by the City and community partners and adopted by City Council on June 23, 2021.
• Under the Province’s Safer Ontario Act, 2018 municipalities are required to develop a Community Safety & Well-being Plan using the provincial government’s Community Safety and Well-Being Framework
• Built into the auditing process are measures to promote and foster community connection and civic engagement. We value and commit to facilitating participants’ connections to other community partners (formal and informal organizations and groups) committed to reducing gender-based violence in public spaces.
• In Fall 2024, we will host a community gathering that invites gender-based safety-committed individuals, organizations, groups, and elected officials to practically explore how we fuel and support our ideas and actions. Stay tuned!