Back in March, on International Women’s Day, Ellie Cosgrave danced out her anger on a busy London Underground train. The reason for her brave, unusual protest? A couple of years previously, a fellow passenger had pressed his erection into her from behind on the very same packed Northern Line carriage, leaving her with semen running down her legs and an anger that only intensified in the months that followed.
It’s an anger that many women travelling on the UK’s trains and buses must share; sexual harassment and intimidation of women is a pervasive but relatively undiscussed problem on public transport systems all over the country. The reason the issue has remained so well-hidden from crime statistics and public debate is clear – like Ellie, many women feel obliged to downplay these incidents in their immediate aftermath, and aren’t at all confident that they’ll be taken seriously if they do report their experiences to the police or transport authorities. The most recent Transport for London safety and security survey paints the picture in numbers: around 15 per cent of London’s female public transport users have experienced ‘”unwanted sexual behaviour” on the network, it found, but up to 90 per cent of those affected didn’t report the incident to police.
Content from our partners
