By Domna Kanari*

19/03/2021

Data is power and the way it is visualised reflects this power as well. However, feminism in data science is an interdisciplinary approach, so that the dynamics of power can be revealed. Social geography is a closely collaborated domain with data science domain.

More particularly, social geography is the branch of human geography that is most closely related to social theory in general and sociology in particular, dealing with the relation of social phenomena and its spatial components. Social geography concentrates on divisions within society, initially class, ethnicity, and, to a lesser extent, religion. However, more recently others have been added, such as gender, sexual orientation, and age. For instance, geography and criminal analysis from the perspective of gender, as it will be presented below, draws the attention of crimes relating to gender, such as gender-based violence.

As DATAWO, we support the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach of gender equality online and we are convinced that social geography can also serve to the indication of the ‘matrix of domination’ in the digital world.

1 Geography and criminal analysis

The human factor shapes its living environment and vice versa. Based on that fact, a new field of geographical interest has been developed, the geography of crime (geographic criminology), which examines the contribution of space to the manifestation of delinquent behaviors and consequently tries to understand the spatial dimension of crime. Crime is a social phenomenon directly related to human nature. The study of the phenomenon of crime has occupied many scholars and has been linked to a variety of socio-economic as well as demographic factors. However, most of the studies are based mainly on economic methods and not on spatial ones and ignored any spatial dimension of the phenomenon.

2 Methods

Crime is not evenly distributed throughout a map. Most of the time it is concentrated in some areas and absent in others. People avoid certain streets due to high criminality and their choices regarding neighborhoods, schools, shops, and recreation are partly driven by the possibilities of becoming a victim of crime in some areas in which the crime rates are higher than in others. This analysis presents an overall picture of the sexual crime situation in Chicago, detects which areas are more dangerous for women analyzing the sexual assault cases using HotSpot Analysis, and determine the percentage of crime that the Chicago Police Department can respond to within five minutes’ drive. The high concentration points of crime or otherwise “hot spots” are areas where crime is highly concentrated. Although there is no common definition of the term “hot spot” there is a common perception that the “hot spot” is an area in which a higher number of criminal cases are reported, or it is an area where people are at higher risk of becoming crime victims. The result of a hot spot analysis is a heat map, a heat map is a continuous surface map that maps how a phenomena or occurrence changes across an area.

3 Results

The total number of sexual crime incidents in Chicago in 2020 was 2063, while the sexual crime events that occurred within a 5-minute distance of a police station were 911. Approximately 44.1% of sexual crime in Chicago occurs within five minutes drive of a police station. This coverage rate is not efficient while at the same time a significant amount of sexual crime occurs too far away from police stations for a fast response time. Blue areas are places where crime occurs but at a low density. Red and yellow areas are places where crime occurs at a particularly high density. Based on the heat map, the highest density of crime occurs in the center of the city, with smaller pockets of crime scattered throughout. Analysis like this provides valuable data to potential victims and helps them feel more secure by knowing which areas to avoid. However, the main purpose is not to stigmatize certain areas and guide women to follow specific routes but to show that we have the right tools to fight sexual abuse with the corporation of social sciences, technology, and geographic information systems.