SINGAPORE: For the twelfth year in a row, Singapore topped the list for perceived safety around the globe, with a whopping 98 per cent of residents saying last year they feel safe walking alone at night.
For the sake of contrast, only 33 per cent of adults in South Africa, which is at the bottom of the Gallup Global Safety Report 2025, say they feel safe. The global average, meanwhile, is 73 per cent, the highest level it has been since 2006, when the survey began.
Gallup defines safety as how secure people feel in their communities. It is measured not only by how many adults say they feel safe while walking alone at night, but also by how much confidence they have in their local police and whether or not they experienced theft or assault over the past year.
This year’s survey involved more than 145,000 adults in 144 countries and territories. Interestingly, global safety perceptions are up this year, driven by an increase in four regions: Asia-Pacific, Western Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa. Notably, 50 per cent of residents in Latin America and the Caribbean now say they feel safe walking alone at night, a milestone for the region as it’s the first time it has reached this level.
However, the number of countries (104) where women feel significantly less safe than men remains concerningly high. Around the globe, 78 per cent of males say they feel safe at night, compared to just 67 per cent of women. The United States has a particularly large gap between men and women: 84 per cent for men, 58 per cent for women.
Safe and secure Singapore
As for the Little Red Dot, its 98 per cent perceived safety rate is one of the highest that Gallup has ever recorded around the globe.
“While many developed countries tend to score high on this measure, Singapore stands out for its consistent performance in terms of the near-universal sense of safety its people feel,” Gallup’s report reads, noting that the percentage of residents reporting they feel safe has never dropped below 94 per cent.
Importantly, the sizable gender disparity found elsewhere in the world is absent in Singapore, where 97 per cent of women and 98 per cent of men said they felt safe in the past year.
“These results reflect Singapore’s long-standing reputation for low crime, effective law enforcement, and strong public order, all of which have contributed to its consistently high levels of perceived safety. However, as it is a small, high-income island city-state, Singapore’s progress may not be easy to replicate in other contexts,” the report added. /TISG
Read also: Expat says ‘safety is a weight she no longer has to carry’ since living in SG
