The UPV creates a geoportal with data on the perception of insecurity to prevent gender violence in urban spaces

VALENCIA, 7 Mar. (EUROPA PRESS) -

A team coordinated by Professor Ana Anquela from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) has developed a geoportal that includes data on the perception of insecurity to prevent gender violence in urban public spaces in five cities around the world, and València, "a very safe," he has served as a pilot.

The project, called Criteria Taronja, has called on UPV students to contribute their experiences of insecurity in public spaces, on the occasion of Women's Day. This Thursday they will participate in a 'mapathon', based on participatory cartography, in which those invited will point out points on the map of Valencia where they have felt a sense of insecurity, street harassment or both.

This initiative of the Geospatial Technologies Research Group of the Polytechnic University of Valencia is subsidized by the Department of Innovation, Universities, Science and Digital Society of the Generalitat Valenciana and is being developed in four cities: Valencia (where the pilot project is carried out) , Dublin (Ireland), Sofia (Bulgaria), Toluca (Mexico) and San Francisco (United States).

"From the information we have, València is a very safe city, which contrasts with Toluca (Mexico), where students are reporting abundant experiences of feelings of insecurity or street harassment near the university campus," explained Ana Anquela.

In general, the project seeks to know in which public spaces in cities women feel unsafe or experience attacks, to improve policies against gender violence, specifically that carried out by men who do not know the victim.

To do this, different layers of data from all cities are compared, from participatory mapping to analysis of sentiments expressed on social networks, including real estate, traffic, and socioeconomic and educational level data.

As Anquela explained, Europe has an open data policy that facilitates the modeling of the perception of security, through quantitative information on infrastructure, socioeconomics, real-time traffic, among others. "However, crime data is restricted, so we have had to request it," she said.

In the United States, on the other hand, data protection policies are more relaxed and the geolocation of crimes is available to citizens.

Finally, in Toluca, "to generate indispensable data sets, it is necessary to intensify the collection of information through citizen science, either through sentiment analysis in social network data, the participation of voluntary groups that report on episodes of violence street violence or feelings of insecurity in public spaces, through Mapathons, or using computer techniques such as web scraping (automatic collection of data from web pages)".

The final result will be an interactive web portal, a geoportal, in which the insecurity situation in each city can be known in real time, as well as its evolution over time. The tool will provide information to decision makers, so that they can deploy more efficient measures and evaluate their results.

The UPV has called on the university community, with special emphasis on the group of female students, to contribute their experiences of insecurity in public spaces in Valencia through an application. This Mapatón (meeting to map an area) took place on Thursday, March 7, within the framework of the activities planned for UPV Women's Day.

Data collection on the experience of insecurity is carried out through citizen science software. This is an application in which users can locate on a map the places where they have been subjected to sexual harassment or have felt afraid (and what caused it).

The Geospatial Technologies Research Group of the UPV has had the collaboration of expert personnel in equality to determine the parameters that contribute to the feeling of security and its relative weight. Interdisciplinary cooperation has also made it possible to establish which behaviors cause a feeling of insecurity in women, such as being followed by a stranger, exhibitionism or expressions of sexual content.

Criteria Taronja has a planned completion date of December 2024, although the Group wants to continue investigating after the date. "The project presents many dimensions that we want to continue delving into," Anquela stressed. The project is designed to be used by managers, she specified, and stressed that the objective is not to generate alarm about a certain area.

According to the United Nations, sexual harassment and other forms of sexual violence in public spaces are a daily problem that women and girls face in all countries of the world. This reduces their opportunities to access education, employment, leisure or public participation and negatively affects their well-being and health.

Anquela explained that Criteria Taronja "acts in the prevention of street gender violence, in cases where the aggressor and victim have no prior relationship." Thus, it contributes to Sustainable Development Goal 5 of the UN Agenda 2030: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.