In 2008 the Korean government reorganised itself, vesting responsibility for management of social risks and conflicts in the Prime Minister’s office, which acquired a central safety management committee. The government’s ‘Building a Safe Society for Women’ project emphasise women’s protection from domestic and sexual violence. This study has been launched in light of necessity of adopting a new perspective on improving women’s safety in their daily life environment.
To achieve the above goal, this study explores theories about social safety, and analyses the concepts and aims of safety from a gender perspective. Although safety has differing meanings in different fields, the study looks at gender differences as regards both recognition and actual conditions of risk in three fields: namely, food, violence, and urban space. Ultimately, this study considers various responses to risks suggested in these three fields, and seeks to propose new policy directions based on the results of investigations and experts’ recommendations.
Above all, this study analyses the gender difference in Koreans’ recognition of safety and fear of crime, based on Report on Social Statistics Survey 2005 by the Korean National Statistical Office. According to this analysis, women feel more anxiety than do men about crime, night-time walking, safety of food and medicines, safety of buildings and facilities, and natural disasters. Interestingly, however, men’s positive and negative responses about information security were higher than for women. Furthermore, the study deals with the task of constructing a safe living environment for women in Vienna, Austria. The city of Vienna has carried out a campaign for gender equality. The distinctive characteristic of gender mainstreaming in Vienna is women-friendly urban space planning.
In addition, the study carries out an investigation of women’s safety conditions in Korean society, based on a selected sample of the population aged over 19 and from across the whole country bar Jeju Island (N=1,200). The research’s subjects were essentially selected on the basis of a certain ratio between gender and age; but the ratio between women and men is 2:1 in order to assist the goal of investigating women’s safety recognition. This investigation deals with gender differences in the subjective recognition of social risks, the possibility of occurrence of social risks, and prevention of social risks and purposes to participation in prevention activities, reliance on social responses to crimes and safety management, and gender differences in safety sensory degree according to time and place.
Based on the understanding of women’s safety conditions in Korean society to be derived from the above investigation, this study explores the present conditions and problems of women’s safety policies, and suggests alternative plans for building a safe living environment for women. The systematic management of objective risk factors, and a reduction in recognised risk factors through the building of social trust, should be undertaken at the same time. The citizens’ recognition of risk is influenced not only by safety systems and removal of specific risk factors, but also by citizens’ social trust of the government or of organisations. Thus, several policy decisions are required for the enhancement of women’s safety in their living environment. These include a systematic long-term plan for the creation of a women-friendly environment, the designation of women’s exclusive facilities, and the introduction of a validation system for community environments that are safe for women - all of these under the continued supervision of the women’s safety management committee within the Prime Minister’s office. ？
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