Journalists Asher and Lyric Fergusson have collaborated with a group of students studying Journalism and Research at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain to create an infographic that ranks the World’s ‘Worst (and Safest) Countries for Solo Female Travel in 2019‘.
The ‘Women’s Danger Index’ study gathered safety and security information based on 50 of the most visited destinations around the world.
“The study shows countries ranked on their level of danger, based on eight key criteria, namely; non-partner sexual violence, intimate partner violence, legal discrimination, intentional homicide of women, violence against women attitudes, safe to walk alone at night, global gender gap, and gender equality,” says Hannelore Oberbauer, one of the students who participated in the study.
According to the infographic ranking below, South Africa is listed as the most dangerous place for a woman to travel alone, while Spain is considered to be the safest.
Editors’ Note: As with most surveys of this kind, one has to consider the many variables that could impact on the results. One such variable is the percentage of cited statistics/incidents that relate to travellers in South Africa specifically. As our article ‘Crime in South Africa? What Crime?‘ notes; many crime stories reported in the media are totally unrelated to travellers and the tourism industry. Reliable statistics are simply not available. Despite the formation of the Tourism Safety Initiative (TSI) in 2007, the Tourism Business Council of South Africa (TBCSA), who had been tasked with managing the TSI, has been unable to deliver on its mandate, which includes data collection and analysis on tourism-related crime to counter the negative effects of the country’s general crime statistics. It is also interesting to note that according to their blog, neither of the aforementioned journalists, Asher and Lyric Fergusson, has ever visited South Africa.
