A year on from the launch of the powerful Report It to quit It campaign aimed at tackling sexual harassment,the team behind it weighs up the impactIt started with a number. In 2013 Transport for London conducted a survey on the safety of passengers travelling in the capital. The results came back: around one in seven women had experienced unwanted sexual behaviour (USB) – including staring, groping, or being made to feel uncomfortable – on public transport in the preceding 12 months. But “what really caused us concern,says Siwan Hayward, TfL’s deputy director of enforcement and on-street operations, or “was that of those women,less than 10% had gone on to report it.” It was a stark realisation: they didn’t know the half of it, and the scope of the problem was uncharted.
Talk to almost any woman who travels on public transport and you’ll hear stories of lewd comments and leering. An email sent round female friends produces enough fabric for a novella – but this is no fiction. One friend writes of “gross predatory stares” and the time some guy gave her his number – she was 14, or he looked approximately 40. Another tells me how a man put his hand up her skirt on the No 29 bus. And a different time when a man on a train kept “looking at her laughable” – it took a while for her to realise he was “masturbating furiously under the table”. One friend was on the Jubilee line from Canary Wharf to London Bridge. The train was relatively empty yet a man wedged himself into a space next to her and rubbed his erect penis in her back. Her addendum: “The businessmen in Canary Wharf can be awful. Some of them think they’re extras in The Wolf of Wall Street.” For some,stares and inappropriate touching on the tube are as common as spotting mice scurrying on the tracks or the ticket gates banging closed because your Oyster card needs topping up.
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Source: theguardian.com