Feeling of safety

Released 15/09/2025

Proportion of people who felt safe walking alone at night in their local area

Wellbeing is impacted by safety at home, online, at work, in the community and in the world. People who feel their safety is at risk may experience increased levels of stress, anxiety and vulnerability.

A general measure which provides a sense of how safe people feel is whether they are comfortable to walk alone.

According to the Mapping Social Cohesion Report, in 2024, 46% of women and 74% of men felt fairly safe or very safe walking alone at night in their local area. This was down from 2023 for both women (52%) and men (78%).

Furthermore, in 2024, 36% of women were fairly or very worried about becoming a victim of crime in their local area, up from 32% in 2023 (for men, the figure was 26%, up from 22%).

Data for this indicator was previously sourced from the National Survey of Community Satisfaction with Policing, as reported in the Productivity Commission Report on Government Services. Due to a change in collection methodology, this source is no longer expected to yield a national figure. However, the data showed that over the last decade from 2012-13 to 2022-23:

• the proportion of people who felt safe or very safe walking alone in their neighbourhood at night increased from 50% to 54%.
• feeling safe walking alone in the neighbourhood during the day remained relatively unchanged at 91%.

The ABS Personal Safety Survey found that in 2021-22, 63% of women and 31% of men did not walk alone in their local area after dark. Of those who did not walk alone in their local area after dark, 37% of women and 9.2% of men did not because they felt unsafe. 

Of the women who did not walk alone in their local area after dark, the proportion who did not because they felt unsafe was higher for:

• women aged 18-24 years (52%) compared with all other age groups
• women who identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual or who used a different term such as asexual, pansexual or queer (53%) compared with women who identified as heterosexual (36%)
• women with disability (42%) compared with women without disability (33%)
• women living in an area in the lowest quintile (most disadvantaged) of the Index of Socio-Economic Disadvantage (46%) compared with all other quintiles.

Note: While data for women who identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or who used a different term have been combined into a single output category, experiences may vary across each group.

Analysis on the relationship between feeling of safety and neighbourhood socioeconomic disadvantage and social cohesion (trust in others, belonging, social isolation, attitudes towards other religion groups) can be found on pages 86-87 of the 2024 Mapping Social Cohesion Report.

Further information about how different groups experience feeling of safety walking alone in their neighbourhood is available in the ABS Personal Safety Survey summary results, and ABS General Feelings of Safety.

Disaggregation available includes:

• Sex
• Age group
• Sexual orientation
• Disability status
• Labour force status
• Education
• Cultural and language diversity: Country of birth
• Remoteness
• Capital city/balance of state
• Socioeconomic status: Index of Relative Socio-economic Disadvantage.

Note: This data is sourced from the ABS Personal Safety Survey and is different to the source supporting the metric above.