Title: Public transport systems and safety of female commuters in low-and-middle- income
countries: a systematic scoping review
Version: 2 Date: 27 Aug 2024
Reviewer:  Jessica Ison
Reviewer's report:
Thank you for your revisions. I offer some more for your consideration.
You still need some more in your background. As I said before, explain the last kilometer home,
for example. Offer some information on specific countries – look at Ceccato and Loukaitou-
Sideris’s book on PT. They have a couple of chapters with some prevalence data.
Further, you could talk about the advocacy from feminists to address this issue, particularly in
light of highly publicised femicides on public transport.
Also, I never usually offer a reference to my own work so please excuse me, but I thought
the team might find my recent paper on women and gender-diverse people’s “safety work”
on public transport useful. It is not in the context of LMIC but might be of interest. Ison, J.,
Forsdike, K., Henry, N., Hooker, L., & Taft, A. (2024). “I’ll Try and Make Myself as Small
as Possible”: Women and Gender-Diverse People’s Safety Work on Public Transport. Violence
Against Women, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/10778012241270279
“Although safety issues for females in higher-income countries (HICs) might not be significantly
different from those in LMICs, this scoping review is focused on LMICs because the public
transport systems and safety issues in these regions are often distinct from those in HICs.” – I
imagine they are different, can you offer research looking at these differences? Can you also
briefly explain the differences in transport systems?
“What research evidence linked to public transport systems and safety of women commuters in
LMICs over the past decade exist?” Sentence is missing a word?
When talking about female commuters, please justify why you have not included gender-diverse
commuters. There is a growing body of work on gender-diverse people’s experiences.
Results
These are still not synthesised enough. As a reader, we don’t want to just read a list of each study
in the findings. We want to see how studies speak to each other and to the theme. In practice, this
isn’t going to be a lot of work, it is just tweaking how you have presented the results. Tell me
about the key findings in that theme and then offer different studies as examples. It makes it much
easier and more enjoyable to read. Though somewhat unrelated, some colleagues have a good
example of this which highlights what I mean: Corbett, E., Theobald, J., Billett, P., Hooker, L.,
Edmonds, L., & Fisher, C. (2022). Revictimisation of Women in Non-Urban Areas#: A Scoping
Review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 0(0), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380221094317
The section on underreporting, can you explain this further. Why do women underreport?
Your section on initiatives and solutions is very short. This is such a big area of the public
transport literature.
Discussion
This is coming together well. You still need to refer back to the literature more, particularly the
paragraphs starting with "The implications fo practice"
Overall, this is really close. Please synthesise the findings more, in line with scoping review
standards.