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These Notts students have created a ‘Notts Safe Space’ group to help students’ safety

It’s open to both male and female students who are insecure about their safety in Nottingham


Eugene Nakuti and Amari Korpal have created a 'Notts Safe Space' group page on Facebook to combat students' fears over their safety in Nottingham.

The group was created due to the increasing amount of girls who are worried about their safety in Nottingham, particularly when it comes to harassment and walking home in the dark. The group does not exclude boys, however it is only open to students.

In the space of 24 hours, the group gained over 1000 members.

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Eugene Nakuti on left

The Founder of Notts Safe Space and 3rd Year Economics and International Economics student, Eugene Nakuti, said that inspiration for the group came from a similar creation at Lincoln University, which specifically targeted women walking home. The recent girls group chat created by second year student Flo Fowler was also a source of inspiration.

The aim of the group is to act as a platform for people to post about incidents / harassment, rather than posting on the Nottingham Buy / Sell Facebook group, which is presently used by many students to share stories of incidents involving them or their friends. "Unfortunately there are a lot of insensitive people who make inappropriate comments on the Buy / Sell posts which may be offensive – we were hoping this would be a comfortable space without being judged by other people", said Eugene on why the group was created.

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Alongside this, the aim of the group is to help girls safely find someone to walk home with if they are alone and concerned about their safety. Speaking on this issue, Eugene said "people do lose their friends on a night out and can end up walking back alone, and it's often forgotten that not everyone makes loads of friends at uni and this can be a common problem for them. So with this page, we were hoping to create some sort of network for people to help each other with getting home.

"Hopefully a similar idea to Fresher reps during Freshers week can be put in place with this; for example, when a girl needed to be taken home, two female reps would take her home to avoid the risk of anything. We want to make it vivid on the page that if you are walking home, you meet in public places and with more than one person. We also don’t expect people to post saying their exact location but more of a post asking if anyone is walking back to Lenton/Uni park/Jubilee etc from town or wherever."

The Bumble app, which aims to create a safe space for women, has agreed to support Notts Safe Space, and Co-founder Amari Korpal, 3rd Year Politics & International Relations student, is working with the Nottingham branch of Citizens UK to bring about awareness of what needs to be done in student areas regarding health and safety.

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Amari Korpal, Co-founder of Notts Safe Space

Notts Safe Space wants people to know they don't just accept anyone and are actually going through the requests to make sure people are University students.

They are also planning to speak with the SU to find a way to have a good number of moderators on the page, and are in the midst of preparing a post laying out the regulations for the page to avoid anyone abusing it.