Earlier this year, police in Victoria, Australia charged a group of teenagers who'd been posing as dating app matches specifically to lure people to a meetup, then rob or assault them once they arrived. It's a striking case, but not an isolated one, and it points to something bigger than any single incident: Dating safety has become something people, and women in particular, are expected to manage almost entirely on their own.
The usual advice is familiar to most of us by now. Meet in public, tell a friend where you're going, arrange your own transport, trust your gut. All of it is sound, and worth doing. But it also puts the entire weight of staying safe on the person with the least power in the situation – the one who's about to meet a stranger. It's worth asking what dating safety might look like if it wasn't built almost entirely around individual vigilance.
Long before "safety tips" made it into a blog post, women had already built an informal system for looking out for each other. Group chats where a friend's location gets dropped before a first date, screenshots of a match's profile sent to someone "just in case," or a code word text partway through a date that means "come get me, now." None of this is officially sanctioned by any dating app, it's just something that got built out of necessity, passed from friend to friend rather than written into a safety policy.
That informal network has done a huge amount of work over the years, largely without much recognition. It grew up organically because women have always looked out for each other, long before "online safety" was a category any platform had to think about. Naming that isn't about pointing fingers, it's about noticing where the effort has landed by default, and asking what it would take to share that load more evenly.
A more women-centred approach to dating safety starts from a different question. Instead of "How do I protect myself?" it asks "What would need to be true of a platform, and a dating culture, for that protection to be less necessary in the first place?" That points toward things like meaningful identity verification, moderation that keeps pace with new tactics as they emerge, and reporting tools that people trust will actually lead somewhere.
It also means paying close attention to who's most affected. Australian research has found that women and LGBTQ+ daters face disproportionately higher rates of harassment and violence connected to dating apps, with some groups, including First Nations users with disability, facing even higher rates again. A safety approach built with the most vulnerable users in mind tends to work better for everyone else too, which is a useful test for what "good" should actually look like.
None of this makes the individual habits pointless, they're just one part of a bigger picture rather than the whole solution. Choosing a public first meeting spot, sorting your own way home, and letting someone know your plans are all still worth doing every time. So is paying attention to pace: A match who's evasive about a video call or pushes hard to meet up immediately, without much conversation first, is worth treating with a bit more caution. And if something feels wrong once you're there, that's reason enough to leave, no further justification required.
Women-centred safety isn't really a fixed destination, it's a standard that keeps rising as platforms, users and researchers all learn more about what actually works. The informal safety net women have built for each other has carried a lot of weight for a long time, and it deserves real credit for that. The more that platforms build with women's experiences truly front of mind, the less that network has to carry alone, and the closer dating gets to feeling as safe as it should from the start.
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