Take back the night - deterring assault

Hi,

Over the past few years my wife and I have become increasingly worried about the increasing frequency, nature and ferocity of assaults, particularly those against women.

My wife works in the city and occasionally has to work late or socialise with work colleagues, this means that she has to travel to the station either in a cab or by foot.

It’s not too much of a problem walking in the summer, but dark winter nights are a different matter so she would take a cab.

Usually you can get a black cab fairly quickly and these are generally quite safe, but sometimes she would have to wait around alone on deserted streets so occasionally she would take a passing minicab.

We thought that it would be a good idea to send a photo of the driver to me but when we tried we always had problems, either the message didn’t arrive or I had to try and retrieve it from a website somewhere, so in the end we gave up.

Matters came to a head last year when the five girls were murdered in Ipswich. Its not a million miles from Ipswich to the city and it’s very easy for a maniac to jump on a train and attack girls somewhere else, so we thought it was about time someone did something about it and try to make the streets a little safer.

Early this year we were fortunate enough to take a long holiday travelling around Australia and during this time I thought up the Bakoff service.

When we returned home I started to investigate how I could implement the idea, what phone services were available, how much server space I would need, how much the various services would cost, how long it would take to set up etc.

We keep the price as low as possible; we would rather have people use the service than risk an assault just for the sake of a few pence.

Bakoff can be used by anyone, anytime, such as deterring fake callers like utility company ‘officials’ etc.

Full details can be found on our website at www.bakoff.co.uk