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Abstract Women began travelling at a time as early as the origin of travel. Because of the traditional male-oriented social value and the small proportion of women tourists in the market, the researchers had not pay any attention to them until 1980s when women became the main part of the tourists market. Nowadays, women become great contributors both to economy and society, therefore, they become more and more independent in economy, their social status also increases, meanwhile the family structure changes a lot. These issues all make women have more spare tome to realise and satisfy themselves in spirit, material, culture and so on. Then, travel began to play an important role in their lives, they are not the atendance of their husbands or their families during travel any more, they have their own travel motivations and expectations and plans, women even began travelling by themselves, such as the women in the European, American, or some Aisan countries. solo woman tourists from Japan, South Krean and Taiwan has become the main target market of the travel worldwide agencies.
With the rapid development and expansion of women tourist market, women tourists' safety and security issue has become more and more apparent and urgent. But the study in this field is very limited. First of all, there exists such a worldwide phenomenon in tourism related studies that the theoretical creativity in this field lags much behind the practical market development in most countries, especially the study ON safety and security of female tourists; secondly, there are very limited literatures about female tourists safety and security both in the formal statictics and academic researches, but many reports from media about female tousists accidents, such as the news from internet, television, broadcast, newspaper or other media ; thirdly, literatures from other countries about this issue are mainly about safety perception, risk cognization, unsafe female behaviors in sex tourism, and protection and risk about pregnant women tourists and so on, which cover a conparatively narrow and shalow scale in this field. Accordingly, the study is only at the primary or preparatory stage, its study depth and width needs to be further strengthened.
This paper collects relative materials about this topic both in English and Chinese writen in the past 20 years. Based on this, it teases, categorizes, and summarizes all the materials, and then studies and commendates them from four aspects, such as mental unsafety perception, unsafe behavior, accidents and protection, and it also estimates the developing trend and necessity of the study on female tourist safey, with the wish for that it can enrich the theory about safety and give adivice about the follow-up study.
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Received: 06 June 2007
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2008, Vol. 23 
