YA Conference 2027 Bari

Planning safety through mobility justice: What can existing reviews tell us about gendered violence and safety in urban mobility systems?

Not scheduled

20m

Polytechnic University of Bari

Qualitative Track 3 | Everyday uncertainty: creating and negotiating places of change

Speaker

Pratishtha Singh (The George Institute for Global Health, University of New South Wales)

Description

Introduction and research problem
Safe mobility is fundamental to health, wellbeing, and participation in urban life. The ability to move safely through public space influences access to employment, education, healthcare, caregiving responsibilities, social networks, and civic participation. While mobility is often analysed through transport accessibility, service provision, and infrastructure performance, it also reflects broader relations of power, safety, and inclusion. For many women and gender-diverse people, mobility is shaped not only by where transport systems go, but by whether public spaces and mobility environments can be navigated without fear of harassment, violence, discrimination, or exclusion. Women routinely report experiences ranging from verbal harassment and unwanted sexual attention to stalking and sexual assault. Gender-diverse populations similarly experience harassment, misgendering, gender policing, and identity-based violence while travelling.

A growing body of systematic reviews has examined gendered violence, mobility barriers, safety interventions, and transport-related exclusion over the past decades. However, evidence remains fragmented across disciplines including transport planning, public health, urban studies, criminology, and gender studies. While these reviews often investigate similar phenomena, they draw on different conceptualisations of violence, safety, mobility, and responsibility. There has been limited synthesis of how these concepts are constructed across reviews, how intersectionality is incorporated, and what implications emerge for planning and policy.

This umbrella review addresses this gap by synthesising evidence from systematic reviews examining gendered violence and safety in mobility systems. Drawing on perspectives from mobility justice, planning, and public health, the primary research question is “What is known from existing systematic reviews about gender-based violence and gendered safety within urban mobility systems, and how are these experiences shaped by intersecting social identities?” Secondary research questions include –

1. What types of violence and safety-related harms affecting women and gender-diverse people in urban mobility systems are synthesized across reviews?
2. Do reviews apply an intersectional framework when examining mobility-related violence and safety, and if so, which intersecting social positions are considered?
3. What structural, environmental, and social determinants of gendered safety and violence in urban mobility are identified across reviews?
4. What interventions, policies, and system-level responses to address gender-based violence and gendered safety in urban mobility exist, and what gaps remain in the evidence?

Methods
This umbrella review was conducted in accordance with the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) guidance for umbrella reviews. We registered the protocol prospectively in January 2026 and is available at the Open Science Framework platform (https://osf.io/ju7z3/). Six databases were searched: Medline/PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, TRID, EBSCO, and PsycINFO. The search strategy combined four key concepts: gender/intersectionality, safety/violence, urban mobility/transport, and equity/inclusion and used search terms such as “gender”, “woman”, “LGBTQI+”, “social identity”, “violen”, “safet”, “transport”, “mobility”, “transit”, “walk”, “equit”, “transport justice” and “barrier*”. Keywords for multiple review types (e.g., systematic, scoping, narrative reviews, etc.) were included to maximise the sensitivity of the search and ensure that all potentially relevant systematic reviews were captured.

Reviews were eligible if they:

1. Examined gender-based violence, harassment, fear, safety, discrimination, or exclusion within mobility systems;
2. Focused on women and/or gender-diverse populations;
3. Used systematic review methodology;
4. Were published in any country, language, or time period.

Two reviewers independently screened studies and extracted data. Findings were synthesised narratively. Methodological quality was assessed using AMSTAR-2.

Results
We retrieved 1079 records from search in electronic databases and finally included 8 studies that met the eligibility criteria, representing primary studies from 113 countries published between 1974 and 2024. Reviews covered public transport, first- and last-mile mobility, ride-hailing services, women's mobility, transit crime, and LGBTQI+ travel experiences. Although the evidence base was geographically diverse, most primary studies originated from high-income countries, particularly the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe.

Five overarching themes were identified.

i. Violence, mobility, and safety are conceptualised in different ways
The literature does not share a common conceptual framing. Some reviews position gendered violence as a subset of transit crime and disorder. Others frame safety concerns as barriers to transport access, while several conceptualise violence as a manifestation of broader structural inequalities and gendered power relations.

Similarly, mobility is most often understood as movement within transport systems. Few reviews conceptualise mobility as a matter of justice, rights, citizenship, or access to public space. As a result, many studies focus on travel behaviour while paying less attention to how urban environments distribute freedom, restriction, and risk across different populations.

Intersectionality was inconsistently applied. Most reviews treated women as a single analytical category and gave limited attention to how experiences varied across race, class, disability, sexuality, migration status, caste, age, or other social positions. Only a small number explicitly examined how multiple forms of disadvantage intersect to shape mobility experiences.

ii. Violence occurs across the entire mobility journey
Across reviews, violence and safety concerns were not confined to transport vehicles. Harassment, unwanted attention, stalking, assault, discrimination, and fear occurred throughout mobility environments.
Particular concerns emerged around first- and last-mile travel where poor lighting, isolation, inadequate pedestrian infrastructure, and limited surveillance created heightened vulnerability. Risks were also reported in stations, waiting areas, walking routes, ride-hailing environments, and onboard public transport.

The evidence therefore supports a whole-journey perspective. Safety experiences are produced through the interaction of multiple environments rather than through isolated transport locations.

iii. Gendered violence reflects broader social and institutional conditions
The literature consistently highlights that violence is shaped by more than physical infrastructure. Environmental factors such as lighting, visibility, crowding, isolation, and urban design influence experiences of safety. However, broader social and institutional forces were equally important. Restrictive gender norms, harassment normalisation, homophobia, transphobia, and gender policing were repeatedly identified as underlying drivers.

Several reviews also documented harmful interactions with transport staff, security personnel, and police. For LGBTQI+ populations in particular, authority figures were sometimes perceived as sources of surveillance, discrimination, or exclusion rather than protection. These findings suggest that safety challenges are not solely technical or infrastructural problems. They are produced through the interaction of physical environments, institutions, governance arrangements, and social norms.

iv. People engage in extensive “safety work”
Women and gender-diverse people routinely modify their behaviour to manage risk. Reported strategies included avoiding certain routes; restricting travel after dark; choosing more expensive modes; travelling accompanied; altering clothing or appearance; and remaining hypervigilant while travelling. Gender-diverse participants additionally reported concealing identity or modifying behaviour to avoid harassment and maintain safety.

While often framed as adaptive behaviour, these practices illustrate how responsibility for safety is frequently transferred from systems to individuals. Participants continuously undertake invisible labour to navigate environments that remain unsafe.

v. Evidence on interventions remains limited
Reviews identified numerous interventions, including improved lighting and station design; CCTV and surveillance systems; mobile safety applications; reporting mechanisms and helplines; increased policing; women-only transport services; awareness campaigns; and community activism and advocacy. Despite the diversity of these interventions, evidence regarding effectiveness was generally weak and fragmented. Many interventions were implemented without rigorous evaluation, making it difficult to establish what works, for whom, and in which contexts.

Multi-component approaches appeared most promising because they addressed multiple drivers simultaneously. These included combinations of infrastructure improvements, institutional reform, community engagement, public awareness activities, and changes to organisational practice.

Discussion
The findings highlight that gendered violence in mobility systems is not simply a transport, policing, or behavioural issue. It is fundamentally a planning challenge because it concerns how cities distribute safety, opportunity, movement, and belonging.

Current responses frequently rely on individuals adapting to unsafe conditions through safety work. From a mobility justice perspective, this represents a system failure rather than a successful adaptation. Planning systems often expect women and gender-diverse people to navigate risk through vigilance and behavioural modification instead of addressing the structural conditions that produce vulnerability.

The review also demonstrates the importance of moving beyond isolated interventions. Safety cannot be achieved solely through brighter lights, additional surveillance, or behavioural advice. Effective responses must recognise how infrastructure, institutions, social norms, governance arrangements, and mobility systems interact. Importantly, planning decisions can either reinforce or challenge these inequalities. Decisions relating to street design, first- and last-mile connectivity, transport reliability, surveillance technologies, policing practices, station design, and public-space governance all shape experiences of safety and belonging. We use mobility justice theory to situate our findings and suggest future interventions (figure attached).

Within contexts of uncertainty, planners therefore face an important challenge: designing mobility systems that do not simply facilitate movement, but enable people to move through cities safely, confidently, and with dignity.

Conclusion
We undertook an umbrella review to synthesise evidence from systematic reviews and found that gendered violence and safety concerns are pervasive features of mobility systems that disproportionately affect women and gender-diverse populations globally. Our findings suggest that addressing gendered violence in mobility requires moving beyond isolated interventions and individual coping strategies towards system-level approaches that address underlying drivers of violence. Framing safety as a matter of mobility justice and public health may help reorient policy and practice towards ensuring that all people can access mobility systems and public spaces safely, equitably, and with dignity.

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