With #MeToo horror stories revealing on a seemingly daily basis just how dangerous the world can be for women, a Singaporean firm has released a ranking of Asia’s safest places for females, with Hong Kong coming in at sixth out of 14 locales analyzed.
To arrive at its findings, financial analysis site ValueChampion scrutinized several international safety and development indices, as well as local legal protections against crimes commonly committed against women, and women’s access to healthcare and opportunity in their respective countries.
Singapore and New Zealand tied for first in ValueChampion’s rankings, followed by Australia, then Japan. Taiwan rounds out the top five, followed by Hong Kong.
The Philippines, Indonesia, and India fared the worst in the rankings, coming in 12th, 13th, and 14th, respectively. Mainland China was ranked 11th.
Of the 14 countries, Hong Kong was ranked highest in terms of women’s access to healthcare, but the SAR earned comparatively poor ratings for safety and opportunity.
Report author Anastassia Evlanova said in an email to Coconuts HK that Hong Kong’s security rating was brought down by the fact that domestic violence remains a problem, and that the legal framework for prosecuting it remains comparatively weak.
“Thus, despite the government trying to take steps to prosecute offenders, domestic violence remains a possible experience for women in everyday life,” she said. “Furthermore, its female homicide rate is still higher than in similarly developed countries.”
Hong Kong, Evlanova noted, is also one of the few countries included where women are murdered at a higher rate than men, according to the latest available gender-separated statistics.
Hong Kong’s opportunity ranking, meanwhile, suffered due to the large pay gap between men and women — “one of the larger differences out of the countries we looked at,” Evlanova said.
However, the report notes that Hong Kong should have fared at least somewhat better. Despite having low crime in general, its security score was pulled down by its inclusion with mainland China in the Global Peace Index, one of the indices used to calculate the rankings.
The report also notes another flaw inherent to its subject matter: many crimes against women go unreported.
The Hong Kong-based sexual violence crisis center RainLily says that as many as one in seven women in the city have been the victim of sexual violence of some form. However, it has also found that as many as 80 percent of perpetrators were acquaintances of victims, resulting in cases being vastly underreported.
Indeed, Social Welfare Department statistics for reported sexual assaults against women — of which there were nearly 1,000 last year — show a majority perpetrated by strangers.
The same set of government statistics, meanwhile, shows that there were nearly 2,400 reported cases of domestic violence perpetrated against women by intimate partners last year. However, these statistics are also said to be vastly underreported.
A South China Morning Post report cites a 2013 poll that found that about a quarter of women in Hong Kong had been victims of domestic violence, but fewer than one in 10 had reported it.
