Executive Summary

Women in Public Spaces

Women have been shunned in public spaces for a long time, especially breastfeeding mothers, who are given strange looks when they try to feed their baby in public. Kerala boasts of the highest human development index, literacy rate and sex ratio yet we still don’t have the government set up breastfeeding rooms for women in public. Considering the fact that we are a country that has the worlds’ youngest population; nearly two-thirds of our 1.2 billion plus population is below the age of 35, including women of prime childbearing age; this number is only growing. We have to have well equipped, clean lactating rooms for mothers so that they do not have to resort to feeding their babies in washrooms and unclean places.

At Project Women in Public Spaces, we aim to promote breastfeeding rooms and urge every public space such as restaurants, hotels, cinema theatres, etc. to set up one for their customers. Until now, we have succeeded in doing so in quite a few places across Trivandrum. We work towards strengthening of laws for pregnant women in public spaces, and along with our associate project Crowdsuit, aim to collect reports of pregnant women who have faced a major inconvenience in a public place, and file a lawsuit against the area or the perpetrator so action can be taken to protect pregnant women at all costs. We will arrange for meetings with as many private and government public spaces as we can and educate them on why lactating rooms are necessary.

Hence, we at Safe Public Spaces for Women work towards making Kerala a safer place for women and pregnant women in particular.