The gendered burden of safety work in urban parks: women’s experiences in West Yorkshire’s green spaces

Urban parks offer social, health and mobility benefits, yet many women and girls experience them as spaces of unease. Drawing on 67 interviews with women and focus groups with 50 teenage girls in West Yorkshire, UK, this article examines the ‘safety work’ that structures their park use—avoidance behaviours, pre‑emptive strategies and situational tactics—and shows how parks’ spatial and affective qualities as ‘spaces apart’ shape these practices. It illustrates how access to urban parks is often conditional, secured through routinised, invisible safety work that imposes mental and practical burdens, limits autonomy and constrains full use. We identify three interrelated forms of safety work: the work of avoiding parks, encompassing behaviours that prevent use; the work to access parks, involving pre-emptive strategies such as planning routes, adjusting timings and seeking companions; and the work in parks, including situational tactics such as monitoring surroundings, altering pace or changing direction. We argue that the benefits of parks are frequently accessible only through sustained safety work, revealing urban parks as gendered landscapes shaped by the social threat of male violence and by spatial and temporal constraints embedded in their design and governance. Policy significance is demonstrated through co-produced Safer Parks guidance embedded in national and international park accreditation and policing initiatives, creating pathways to shift responsibility for safety from individual burden to institutional action. We conclude by outlining design and governance principles and a research agenda for intersectional, co-produced park safety.