The apparent mismatch between women’s fear and the level of violence the official statistics say they experience is not just about the general stew of menace women are navigating. Women also aren’t reporting the more serious offences. A 2016 survey of sexual harassment in the Washington DC metro found that 77% of those who were harassed never reported, which is around the same level found by Inmujeres, a Mexican government agency that campaigns on violence against women.48
The reporting rate is even lower in New York City, with an estimated 96% of sexual harassment and 86% of sexual assaults in the subway system going unreported, while in London, where a fifth of women have reportedly been physically assaulted while using public transport, a 2017 study found that ‘around 90% of people who experience unwanted sexual behaviour would not report it’.49 An NGO survey of female metro users in Baku, Azerbaijan found that none of the women who said they had been sexually harassed reported it to the appropriate authority.50
Clearly then, official police data is not showing the full picture. But although there is a lack of global data on ‘the exact nature, location and time’ of sexual crimes against women in public spaces, a growing body of research shows that women are in fact not being irrational.51
From Rio to Los Angeles men have raped women and girls on buses while drivers carry blithely along their routes.52 ‘The truth is that every time I leave my house, I am scared,’ said Victoria Juárez, a thirty-four-year old woman from Mexico where nine in ten women have experienced sexual harassment while using public transport,53 and female workers report that men hang around in cars ‘to kidnap women getting on and off buses’.54 Travelling to and from work is, they say, the most dangerous part of their day.
A 2016 study found that 90% of French women had been victims of sexual harassment on public transport;55 in May that year two men were jailed for an attempted gang rape on a Paris train.56 A 2016 Washington metro survey found that women were three times more likely than men to face harassment on public transport.57 In April that year58 a suspect was identified in an indecent exposure incident on the Washington metro; a month later he had escalated to raping a woman at knifepoint on a train.59 In October 2017 another repeat offender was arrested on the Washington metro: he had targeted the same victim twice.60
‘The message is unanimous across all articles of this special issue’, wrote professor of urban planning Vania Ceccato in her afterword to a 2017 special issue of the academic journal Crime Prevention and Community Safety, ‘Women’s Victimisation and Safety in Transit Environments’: ‘sexual crime against women in transit (cases of staring, touching, groping, ejaculation, exposing genitalia and full rape) is a highly under-reported offence’.61
Women don’t report for a variety of reasons. Some of these are societal: stigma, shame, concern that they’ll be blamed or disbelieved. And there is little that authorities can do about this. That change has to come from society itself. But many women don’t report for more prosaic issues that can be far more easily addressed.
For a start, women often aren’t sure exactly ‘what counts as sexual harassment and are afraid of the response of authorities’.62 Assuming they do realise that what has happened is wrong, they often don’t know who it is they have to report to.63 Around the world there is a lack of clear information for women on what to do if they are sexually harassed or assaulted on public transport (although most authorities seem to have managed to install clear signage about what to do in the event of spotting a suspicious package). Sometimes, though, the lack of signage is because there really aren’t any procedures in place.64 And this leads to the next problem: the experiences of those women who do report.
In 2017 a British woman tweeted about what happened when she reported a man who was sexually harassing her on a bus.65 After asking her what she expected him to do, the bus driver commented, ‘You’re a pretty girl, what do you expect?’ Her experience echoes that of a twenty-six-year-old woman riding a bus in Delhi: ‘It was around 9 p.m. A man standing behind touched me inappropriately. I shouted and caught the guy by his collar. I made the driver stop the bus too. But I was told to get off and solve it myself because other passengers were getting late.’66
Fear of being dismissed was why Sarah Hayward, a former local councillor for my borough in London, didn’t report. ‘I was felt up on a packed Tube train when I was about twenty-two. I can’t begin to explain the absolute terror of that feeling. And I just knew that if I said anything, people would think it was just that the Tube was packed.’ The irony is, the Tube having been packed may well have been a factor in what happened to her: the data we have suggests that peak travel times coincide with peak sexual harassment times.67 Hayward tells me that she still tries ‘to avoid the Tube in rush hour’.
The lack of reporting procedures for sexual assault is also a problem in the sky. A 2016 Slate article told the story of Dana T. who, mid-flight between the US and Germany, woke up to find a hand squeezing her breast hard.68 It belonged to the man sitting next to her. She told cabin crew who initially tried to make
