Post the Nirbhaya case in December 2012 in Delhi, women's safety was among the top conversational topics. It was established that it should be of prime concern to the country's government, especially Delhi, to introduce safety norms. It became mandatory for phones made post-2017 to have an emergency panic button in response to the same. For this research, Karusala and Kumar conducted interviews and surveys to investigate the public's opinions about safety and their inquiry about the panic button's introduction [2]. The panic button was looked at through the Feminist HCI lens proposed by Bardzell [1]. They questioned the environment and the people (together, they affect the already complex ecology) that make women feel safe and comfortable, discussed cultural norms and technology intervention, especially smartphones, and how women used those to feel safe on their terms while out alone. This discussion was followed by the shortcomings of using smartphones for the panic button or any method that the users do, like sharing location with friends and family. Further, they discussed what the citizens thought about the law enforcement, and the police and users questioned if they were trustworthy. They mentioned public humiliation and victim-blaming. To conclude the conversation, the influence of media was highlighted, and the users talked about what they would do in dire situations. The authors have given a comprehensive explanation of the above-mentioned themes of their conversations with the users, supplemented with user quotes.
The choice of research methodology was interviews and surveys, which made their data collection strong. The themes of the questions were categorized well after doing open coding. However, it is mentioned that the questions asked in both of these were the same. One possible reason for this is to reach out to a broader audience since not everyone may want to give time for an interview. Interviews provide another layer of information since they have scope for further conversation, which is not the case with surveys. I think it's redundant to adopt both methods for the same goal. Alternatively, the researchers could have first conducted interviews and collected qualitative data. They could make their survey questions to get a quantitative overview of the situation based on those results.
As highlighted by the authors, the target audience is restricted to the urban Delhi population. One very interesting thing that wasn't considered but could have been was the dynamic of families in Delhi and who has access to a smartphone and potential cases of domestic violence. For instance, in a family, two or more people might share their phones. Who has it at any point in time depends on the priority of their work. Moreover, sometimes, the male in the family may have access to the phone for a significant part of the day. Considering this would bring about a substantial impact on the result of the study. The government did not consider this to make the panic buttons, but researchers can consider this to make their proposed solutions more inclusive and pluralistic.
I believe it is worth mentioning that the paper does not point out the qualities of Feminist HCI in their methodology but still reflects some of them. For instance, Karasula and Kumar took a great decision to include the male participants' perspective who responded through snowball sampling. This decision added to pluralism in their participatory approach to research.
Some of the users drew a comparison between Delhi, Mumbai, and cities in Gujarat concerning safety. This can be a separate extended study, where this difference can be explored better, and if possible, deploy the safety measures for public spaces followed in other states in Delhi. Another possible direction can be researching to see if social distancing rules have impacted women's comfort level in otherwise crowded spaces. Moreover, there has been no recent major crime reported that hit all news media. Women may not be as panicked about it now. The work's result can be penned down in one statement - The panic button installed in phones is an ineffective, inadequate measure to increase women's safety. The paper talks in detail about the reasons to prove the above statement. They have made some suggestions like installations in public places and even having wearables. These are interesting and have scope for research and deployment.
References
Shaowen Bardzell. 2010. Feminist HCI: taking stock and outlining an agenda for design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1301–1310. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753521
Naveena Karusala and Neha Kumar. 2017. Women’s Safety in Public Spaces: Examining the Efficacy of Panic Buttons in New Delhi. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 3340–3351. Retrieved January 19, 2021 from https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025532