This affects women’s paid labour: women make up 91% of the 86% of Indians who work in the informal economy. Many of these women work as market vendors, and no public toilets means they have nowhere to go during the workday.14 In Afghanistan, female police officers go to the toilets in pairs, because their changing and toilet facilities (described by an international advisor to Human Rights Watch as ‘a site of harassment’) often have peepholes or doors which don’t lock. The lack of safe toilet provision in fact often prevents women from joining the force at all, and this in turn has had a significant impact on how the police respond to crimes against women and girls.15
Despite women’s arguably greater need for public sanitary facilities, however, men are often the ones who are better provided for. More than half of Mumbai’s 5 million women do not have an indoor toilet and there are no free public toilets for women. Meanwhile, free urinals for men run into the thousands.16 A typical Mumbai slum might have six bathrooms for 8,000 women,17 and government figures from 2014 revealed that the city as a whole has ‘3,536 public restrooms that women share with men, but not a single women’s-only facility – not even in some police stations and courts’.18
A 2015 survey found that 12.5% of women in Mumbai’s slums defecate in the open at night: they ‘prefer to take this risk to walking 58 metres, the average distance of the community toilet from their homes’.19 But defecating in the open isn’t really much safer for women: there is a real danger of sexual assault from men who lurk near and on the routes to areas which are known to be used by women when they need to relieve themselves.20 The level of violation ranges from voyeurism (including being masturbated at) to rape – and in extreme cases, to murder.
Accurate data on the level of sexual harassment and assault faced by women as they seek to engage in what should be a mundane activity is hard to come by, in no small degree because of the shame surrounding the issue. Few women are willing to talk about something they may well be blamed for ‘encouraging’.21 But what data does exist makes it clear that a failure to provide adequate sanitation is a feminist issue.
A 2016 study found that Indian women who use fields to relieve themselves are twice as likely to face non-partner sexual violence as women with a household toilet.22 Following the 2014 murder of two girls aged twelve and fourteen in Uttar Pradesh,23 there was a brief flurry of national focus on the lack of adequate toilet provision for women, and in December 2014, Bombay’s high court ordered all municipal corporations to provide safe and clean toilets for women near main roads.24 Ninety-six potential sites were identified and Bombay’s local government promised 50 million rupees (around £550,000) to build new toilets. But a year later, reported online women’s rights magazine Broadly, not a single brick had been laid.25 The fund allocation lapsed in 2016.26
Local governments that fail to provide public toilets may believe that they are cutting costs, but a 2015 Yale study suggests that this is a false economy. The study authors developed a mathematical model linking the ‘risk of sexual assault to the number of sanitation facilities and the time a woman must spend walking to a toilet’, and calculated the tangible costs (lost earnings, medical, court and prison expenses) and intangible costs (pain and suffering, risk of homicide) of sexual assault versus the cost of installing and maintaining toilets.
They applied their model to Khayelitsha, a township in South Africa, which has an estimated 5,600 toilets for a population of 2.4 million, resulting, the authors claimed, in 635 sexual assaults at a cost of $40 million each year. Increasing the number of toilets to 11,300, at a direct cost of $12 million, would almost half the average distance to a toilet and result in a 30% decrease in sexual assault. According to the mathematical model, the reduced social and policing costs more than offset the additional cost of providing toilets, leaving the township $5 million better off. These figures, they added, were conservative, since their costings had not included ‘the many additional health benefits of improving sanitation in resource-constrained urban areas’.27
And there are many additional health benefits, particularly for women. Women get bladder and urinary-tract infections from holding in their urine; others suffer from dehydration or chronic constipation.28 Women who defecate outdoors are at risk of a range of infections and diseases, including pelvic inflammatory disease, worm infections, hepatitis, diarrhoea, cholera, polio and waterborne diseases. Some of these diseases kill millions of people (particularly women and children) every year in India alone.29
Health problems arising from a lack of public sanitary provision are not restricted to low-income countries. Canadian and British studies have revealed that referrals for urinary-tract infections, problems with distended bladders, and a range of other uro-gynaecological problems have increased proportionately to toilet closure; similarly, research shows that the chances of streptococcal toxic shock syndrome from sanitary protection are increased ‘if there are no toilets available to change tampons during menstruation’.30 And, increasingly, there isn’t a toilet available. A 2007 study revealed that public-toilet closure in the US has been a trend for over half a century.31 In the UK, 50% of public toilets were closed between 1995 and 2013 – or, as in the public toilet closest to where I live in London, converted into the proverbial hipster bar.32
Urban planning that fails to account for women’s risk of being sexually assaulted is a clear violation of women’s equal right to public spaces – and inadequate sanitary provision is only one of the many ways planners exclude women with this kind of gender-insensitive design.
Women are often scared in
