Yes, I agree it’s complex! Trying to get data is very difficult but there should be a national coordinated approach and database to improve future provision. The problem being schools don’t know what goes on in the toilet cubicle. They are one of the only places you can’t put cctv. Though that hasn’t stopped various measures like voice activated ‘help me’ or ‘stop it’ alarms and heat sensors trying to mitigate. They don’t appear to have data (still) on where sexual assaults happen in schools. Yet the estimates I have from various sources are bad (rapes within school buildings vary between 3 and 5 per school week in the UK) and of course Everyone’s Invited also mention toilets a lot - incidents that don’t seem to get reported.
Every safeguarding inquiry says we need better data collection. Yet nobody bothers about location specifics. The best information I have is from British Transport Police, but though they could give me information on toilets in stations, they didn't break down the sexual assaults in including rapes data in train carriages over the last 10 years. They listed victim by sex and perpetrator by gender.
To design-out crime you need to know the design and the crime. There really should be more researchers looking at this for toilets. We have learnt that the mixed sex, private accessible (disabled) toilets needed radar keys to prevent sex, drugs and vandalism yet standard unisex toilets have no such safeguards. And what do the EHRC say in their toilet example in a shopping centre? Consider retrofitting a private, mixed sex toilet for ‘distress’ and ‘safety’. As far as I can tell, no risk assessment was done on that either.
Let Lambeth and Hackney et al join up the dots. Where are women safe if everywhere is mixed sex?