A year on from the murder of Sarah Everard and ahead of International Women’s Day over six in ten British women said walking alone at night is something they don’t feel safe doing.
According to a YouGov poll, for the BBC, women are most likely to say they feel unsafe walking alone home at night, including a quarter (26 percent) who say they ‘always’ feel unsafe doing so.
Overall, 66 percent of women say they feel unsafe walking home at night at least ‘sometimes’, and another 20 percent never do so in the first place – which many women won’t do anyway for their safety.
Along with this the results showed over half of the women (53 percent) surveyed regularly avoid being out at certain times of the day to reduce any risk of actually being harassed or sexual assaulted.
Only 16 percent of men surveyed said the same thing and as little as five percent said they never walk alone at night.
Walking with another person during the daytime was when women said they felt safest, according to 57 percent of women saying ‘I never feel unsafe in this situation’.
In all cases, compared to the men surveyed, women said they were considerably more likely to find themselves afraid in what should be average everyday situations.
Broken down by age, younger women fear for their safety in these everyday situations than older women.
74 percent of women aged 18-29 who ever use a taxi by themselves said they feel unsafe at least sometimes when doing so.
This statistics lowered for women in older age groups; women in their 30s it was 59 percent, for women in their 40s it was 52 percent, for women in their 50s it was 47 percent and for women 60 and over it was 32 percent.
The results were, unfortunately, similar to that of a YouGov poll asking similar questions six months earlier which showed women felt less safe walking alone at night than they did in 2018.