It 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, being made to feel uncomfortable – on public transport in the previous 12 months. But “what really caused us concern”, says Siwan Hayward, TfL’s deputy director of enforcement and on-street operations, “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 material 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, he looked about 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 funny” – 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.
So how does the country’s busiest transport network go about making travel safer for women? And how do you get women to report incidents when it isn’t? Last week, a German train operator introduced women-only carriages (insisting it wasn’t linked to sexual harassment but to customer requests “for more privacy”), and while those carriages are common across the world – Japan, Russia, Brazil and India, for instance – the idea of segregated public transport in London was broadly laughed out of town when Jeremy Corbyn was asked to raise the issue last year. Is it the answer? TfL reckons not. However, in 2013 it launched Project Guardian in conjunction with the British Transport, Metropolitan and City of London police forces. Initially, the project was designed to train TfL staff, raise public awareness and ask them to work more closely with the authorities. “We had to be confident,” says Hayward, that “if women reported, they were believed … and that any information we were passed would lead to eliminating USB on public transport.”
Anecdotally this statistic plays out – of the friends I spoke to, none thought to report their experiences. And neither did I, when a man on the Central Line used the slight lurch of the train to take a much bigger lurch at me, penis erect like a horizontal flagpole through his suit trousers. Since when did Londoners, not known for being timid, put up with this kind of thing? When it comes to sexual harassment, it seems we’re strangely silent. And so, one year ago, the powerfully hard-hitting Report It to Stop It campaign was launched. Although there had been other campaigns about women’s safety – specifically the risks of travelling by minicab – this was the first on the underground. If you haven’t seen the ad, take a minute to watch it on YouTube. In it, a woman goes from feeling the stares of a man while she is waiting on a platform, to feeling his hot breath on her neck in a busy carriage. This escalates to his hand grazing her bum, then groping it, before finally he presses himself firmly up against her, at which point she leaves the tube, thoroughly flustered.Throughout it, the actor Olivia Colman narrates what is happening, and repeatedly asks: “Would you report it?”
The ad is progressive in the way it manages to highlight the nuances of harassment – the insidiousness, and the way it can slide, before you know it, from the barely perceptible to the “no doubt about it, that’s a hand on my bum”. It’s clever about linking those types of behaviour, too, and showing that while the extreme is unacceptable, so too is the starting point.
“It’s harder to get people to report something they don’t perceive as serious, because it’s been normalised by society,” explains Cressida O’Shea, a planner at M&C Saatchi and part of the 12-strong, largely female team tasked with creating a talking point. O’Shea thinks this was key: “It became a very direct, personal communication. It’s really asking you to reflect.”
The Project Guardian team knew the strategy would draw criticism. They knew, Hayward says, it would lead to the kinds of headlines that have plagued them since: “Reports of sex attacks on the tube have trebled in the last five years” is the gist. But they did it anyway. For Hayward, it’s been frustrating: “The welcome consequence of the marketing campaign – an increase in reporting of USB – has been twisted by some to criticise the police and our partnership as a sign of our failure, when it is the exact opposite; it means that the transport system in London is getting safer for women and girls.”
Superintendent Gill Murray, of the BTP, says: “The bottom line is that until we have a proper picture of what, where, when, why and to what extent, it’s very hard for a police service.” That is, unless we keep reporting incidents on the tube network, the police will be slower at tracking offenders and knowing where and when to best to deploy extra officers. Crucially, the message also needed to communicate that it was about stopping all unwanted sexual behaviour. “Absolutely a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g that makes you feel uncomfortable,” Hayward spells out.
When planning the campaign, the team looked carefully at the barriers that led to the low percentage of reporting. Research conducted by TfL showed that USB was “very common, widespread,” says Hayward: “People didn’t think it was an offence, they didn’t think police would take it seriously, and they just wanted to forget about it.” The BTP’s answer, and the clear message of the video, is: “Leave us to worry about whether something’s criminal or not, just report it.”
Which begs the obvious, if slightly troubling, question: what’s the point? When one man gropes you on a packed underground, the phrase needle in a haystack comes to mind. How likely is it that they’re ever going to catch the perpetrator? Murray’s keen to stress that, for one thing, it’s a very CCTV-rich environment. Then there’s Oyster technology, which allows tracking of people’s movements.
What individual women might not appreciate when someone harasses them is that the authorities will often have pre-existing knowledge of the attacker. This kind of behaviour is often compulsive. “You’ve got to give our boys and girls a chance,” says Murray, sounding pleasingly like a copper off the telly. Information will help to identify patterns of behaviour, meaning that police officers can work more strategically to reduce the problem.
There have been some bumps in the track. For one, people are often unwilling to go further than texting the service. Murray believes 30-40% of people reporting don’t wish to pursue the case. “Now, I don’t want to take anything away from the fact it’s building a picture. It all adds weight to help us put our people in the right place at the right time.” But, she says, she wants passengers “to be willing to sit down with one of my detectives and record it and pursue it properly”.
Has the campaign been a success? According to Hayward, there’s “not enough data yet to say it’s a trend” but “we are beginning to see what we hope is actually the prevalence of sexual offences falling”. One year since its launch, the video has been watched more than 4m times and 36% more people now come forward to report unwanted sexual behaviour on the network. This increase has, in turn, led to a 40% increase in arrests. But the real win is the cultural shift this signals – women won’t accept this behaviour as routine any more, and neither will the authorities.
To report anything that makes you feel uncomfortable on the tube, text 61016 or call 101
