New research from Girlguiding has revealed stark statistics about the everyday reality of sexism, misogyny, and harassment facing girls across the UK. Their 2025 Girls’ Attitudes Survey shows how the persistent threat of gender-based abuse is restricting freedom, damaging confidence, and affecting mental health in our young women.
The Girlguiding report found that:
This is precisely the space where Serve Legal is working with clients, councils, and local government. Our services—including safety perception audits, environmental mapping audits, and venue safety audits—are designed to assess how safe people feel in the places they live, work, travel, and socialise.
Through this work across the hospitality, leisure, transport, retail, BID, and council sectors, we see first-hand what Girlguiding’s research reflects: young women feel unsafe not only in schools and on the streets of their hometowns, but also in the venues they choose to attend.
It isn’t just teenage girls—our research shows that women of all ages share these concerns. Serve Legal 2025 survey data reveals that men feel 22% more safe than women in towns and centres, with women's feelings of safety dropping by 25% when the sun sets.
Serve Legal’s data also shows that women, regardless of age, feel markedly less safe at night compared to during the day. This 25% decline in safety perception is consistent across every female age group, underlining that women’s safety is not a generational issue but a structural one — spanning transport, town centres, and venues. Addressing it requires systemic changes in how our public spaces are designed and managed.
We are proud to be working with major players across this sector and engaging with key institutions, including the Home Office and the Ministry of Housing, Councils and Local Government, to support efforts to tackle violence against women and girls and improve safety perceptions across communities. Last week, our team met with representatives from both departments to discuss practical next steps, and we continue to collaborate with retailers, BIDs and councils to address safety gaps and ensure that the lived experience of women and girls is reflected in decision making.
We support Girlguiding’s call for political and community leaders to commit publicly to tackling misogyny and violence against women and girls. Promises alone are not enough—what’s needed is sustained, evidence-based action.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council has called violence against women and girls an epidemic. The scale of the problem requires collective effort.
At Serve Legal, we are in the final stages of publishing our own survey and audit data, which will add further evidence to support industry-wide change. By working together—across public, private, and community sectors—we can ensure that safety is no longer a privilege but a standard expectation for people of all ages and genders.
For any media or corporate enquiries in relation to Serve Legal's ongoing efforts, feel free to get in touch with the team.