Let’s face some unfortunate facts about travel safety and the sexes. It is unfortunately true that women face a tougher security environment than men, especially with respect to matters of the opposite sex as well as matters of street crime. It is a commonplace that when a woman walks alone down the street, she can, unfortunately, be heckled by men who are nearby, and can be threatened up to and including sexual assault. This is not to belittle the security challenges that any person faces, whether male or female, when traveling in another country.
A Travel Safety App for Women (And Men)
Photo credit: Clearly Ambiguous via Foter.com / CC BY
If you are the administrator of a college or university, or perhaps a global corporation, it may be the travel safety concerns of women that first bring to your attention the need for your organization to think in detail and create some types of plans and procedures to do as much as is possible to safeguard the safety of the members of your organization, whether women or men. In that sense, ironically and unfortunately, it may be that the safety vulnerabilities of women create a conversation and an awareness of travel safety that is good for everyone. That is certainly our hope.
Technology Makes Travel Safety Apps Possible: But You Must Deploy Them
In the modern era, one of the good things about the technological revolution is that new features are possible. Let’s use the example of a college campus. Back in the 1970s and 80s, many colleges across the United States rolled out blue lights across their campuses, where, women or men, who were feeling that they might be threatened, would be able to run up to these blue lights, and push a button to notify the campus police. This was in the era before mobile phones. It was a step forward to help the security needs of women and men, especially at night as they walked around. Today, fortunately, nearly everyone has a mobile phone, and by using a travel safety app such as FoneTrac, they are able to instantly send panic alerts to the local authorities as well as to the GlobalSecur backend.
If your organization has women, or men, who may feel that it times they need a travel safety app, this new technology enables some level of increased safety and security. It is far from perfect, and there is no guarantee of perfect security. But it is a step forward, and certainly for women, but also for men, the idea of having an travel safety app in their pocket to which they can reach when they are feeling threatened, and the fact that this app is integrated with real-time support is not only comforting but empowering.
If you’re interested in exploring the features of FoneTrac to improve the travel safety of women in your organization (or men), please feel free to reach out for demonstration.
Photo credit: Clearly Ambiguous via Foter.com / CC BY
