Here are the safest countries for women – and the UK doesn’t even make the top five

An effective measure of the safety of a country is to look out how well they treat their female population.

Australia has topped the list of safest country for women, according to data from consultancy New World Health, released in its 2019 Global Wealth Migration Review.

In order to come up with the top five safest countries, the research group, based in Johannesburg South Africa looked at a number of factors including economic growth, press freedom and women’s safety.

While Australia nabs the top spot for the second year in a row, the UK doesn’t even break the top five.

Here are the five safest countries in the world for women:

1. Australia

2. Malta

3. Iceland

4. New Zealand

5. Canada

"Woman safety is one of the best ways to gauge a country's long-term wealth growth potential, with a correlation of over 90 per cent between historic wealth growth and woman safety levels," the report explained.

This means that wealth growth is boosted by strong levels of woman safety in a country.

Results were based on a country’s crime statistics, for example the percentage that has been victims of rape, slavery, human trafficking and assaults (on women) in the last year.

In their research, they found that women could shockingly be arrested for even reporting rape in over 40 countries.

And in countries with reasonable crime statistics, such as the USA and Australia, for every one sexual assault reported, three go unreported.

The study also highlighted the safest countries by region:

Europe:Malta, Monaco, Iceland, Switzerland

Asia Pacific:Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea

Africa: Mauritius, Botswana, Namibia

Americas:USA, Canada

But there is one small caveat…

Out of the 195 countries, the report said only 58 had reasonably reliable crime statistics. As a result, countries whose crime statistics that were deemed unreliable by researchers were not included in the top five.

According to a wide-spanning report by the Thomas Reuters Foundation, the top five most dangerous places to be a woman in the world are, in order: India, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia and Saudi Arabia.

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