Violence against women and girls continues despite the implementation of preventative measures. This paper presents findings from a Home Office-funded Safer Street project from West Midlands and focuses on the Safety of women and girls in the Nighttime Economy. We have created and used an inclusive definition of the Nighttime Economy to involve maximum participation. Moreover, women and girls who live or work in the area were engaged using unique and innovative ways to understand.
A mixed method study design was adopted including population surveys, identification of best policing practices, systematic review and qualitative enquiry such as participatory workshops. In this paper, we report findings from two data collection methods that are two population surveys and five participatory workshops. Findings from the project evidence reasons for fear, forms of fear, and strategies women and girls adopt to feel safe. Findings also demonstrate that some issues are universal with the safety of women and girls as highlighted by international scholars, but some are unique to the area and linked with historic exploitation incidents.
This paper highlights the importance of collaboration between the community and local authorities to create effective and culturally sensitive solutions for addressing violence against women. This participatory model recognises the significance of community input in shaping policies and interventions that are more likely to be successful and sustainable. We also emphasise the recommendations from the project that are already making an impact on the implementation of safety measures in the concerned area.

The Empowering Communities program in Victoria, Australia provides large grants to community-led action groups in select higher crime local government areas to foster local community-led crime prevention initiatives. The program objectives include enhancing community capability in addressing local crime concerns through designing and implementing effective prevention strategies, fostering stakeholder relationships for collaborative efforts, and expanding the evidence base for successful crime prevention.

Through embedding for two years in four local action groups, the researchers have conducted an in-depth evaluation of this novel place-based approach to crime prevention funding. While the funding model has been well-received, and innovative local initiatives funded, challenges have emerged in enabling truly flexible, community-led approaches. This presentation offers a critical perspective on how community empowerment and participation in crime prevention are shaped by broader socio-political dynamics and power relations. It situates these within a critical criminological discourse that questions the mechanisms of governance, the meaning of empowerment, the nature of expertise, and the role of community in developing crime prevention efforts.

In recent years, public sexual harassment (PSH) has been the focus of criminological research, political debate and media attention. Although defining PSH has been challenging, it has been suggested that it is a gendered phenomenon in that men are more likely to be the perpetrators of PSH, while women are far more likely to be the victims/survivors.

The current paper focuses on gendered harassment in public, conceptualizing the phenomenon as unwelcomed and unwanted attention, sexual advances and intimidating behaviour that occurs in physical and online public spaces. To explore the gendered nature of PSH, the current work takes an inclusive approach to gender, based on the idea that it can be experienced by all and is carried out because of gender discrimination or genderism.

This presentation discusses the findings from a survey that was conducted in 2024 in the UK (n=500), exploring gendered harassment in public and its gendered nature. Taking a non-binary approach to the measurement of gender, the study looked at the prevalence of gendered harassment in public, its spatial context, different types of involvement, and attitudes to relevant criminal policies.

This paper considers Watch Groups operating in the UK, representing self-mobilised groups of individuals responding to apparent security crises. Such crises may include anti-social behaviour, shoplifting, irregular immigration, child abuse or breaches of fox hunting laws. Though citizens being co-opted into policing functions is hardly new, the past two decades have seen a rapid growth of groups coalescing around security concerns and using everyday technologies to perform surveillance and security activities. Drawing on interviews with a range of Watch Groups members ranging from so-called paedophile hunters to fox hunt saboteurs, the paper presents early findings concerning the motivations of group members, how they rationalise their activities and the extent to which they are aware of the potential harms of their actions. The paper also considers whether and how Watch Groups seek to work with, in parallel to or in opposition to State policing actors, particularly since some groups are created in response to a dissatisfaction with a perceived lack of police action on certain issues. Such discussions are critical in order to develop understandings of how Watch Groups ought to be regulated (if at all), and the extent to which they can and should form part of plural policing networks in the UK.