Safe Yelli: Reporting harassment anonymously

Bengaluru: A few college students from Yelahanka have developed a platform to report incidents of harassment in their area completely anonymously. The Safe Yelli platform is devised with the idea to document the rising cases of harassment in the area and provide a tool for Bengaluru police.

Launched just a few days back, Safe Yelli is a novel idea by a couple of young minds who noticed that a large section of catcalling and harassment meted out mostly to women was going unreported. The platform originally was built as part of a college assignment to provide a safe space for women to report cases of harassment in complete anonymity. But the team has decided to make it bigger and as a pilot project support only the Yelahanka area.

Once a person experiences a case of harassment, they can go to the platform and report by selecting the location and providing the date, time and description of the cases. After the report is filed, the incident is tagged on a Yelahanka map and you can view cases on a location basis. Though not mandatory, the platform also collects other details like whether the victim approached the police and the reaction of the police authorities to conduct further research on the subject.

"We heard from our friend circles and WhatsApp groups about several women getting catcalls, cases of hand-pulling, cases of peeping-tom, harassment at night in the last decade. Despite the rising cases, police have not been able to take action against the culprits due to a lack of resources. They don't have enough resources to police all streets in Yelahanka" said co-founder of Safe Yelli, Adhavan Sivaraj. He added that women who try to confront their catcallers often face intimidation or stalking y their abusers. There have also been cases of people messing with CCTVS, climbing hostel compounds and a single case of a rape case in the vicinity. "It started as a college assignment where we were encouraged to take a social problem and we were asked to devise a technical solution. We spoke to students and faculty members as part of the research. For our primary research, we took details in a google form and then interviewed them individually. Further, we created a map where we could place all these incidents" he added.

He said while doing research, they also discovered a Nigeria-based open-source platform, Ushahidi built to crowdsource resources during a crisis and decided to implement the platform with it.

Currently, the platform shows 29 cases, though most of the cases have either happened before the launch or were part of primary research conducted by the team.

"We would like to go beyond Yellahanka and offer it for the entirely of Bengaluru. There are so many incidents that go unreported that it is difficult to derive actual statistics from police figures. After a few months, we will be able to analyse data and also expand to include other cases of civic violations. We intend to provide this tool to the police and municipal corporations in future" said Adhavan.

Talking about anonymity in these reports, he added, "This is a good start. For vulnerable communities like students, especially those who have migrated from other states, this will be a good support system" The team is also currently working on translating the platform in Hindi and Kannada to provide accessibility to larger sections.