A couple of months ago, the New York Times posted this piece by a woman who was groped on a crowded subway in New York City.
In a nutshell, she discusses her experience on her daily commute on a crowded subway, where, one day a lecherous and disgusting man gropes her. Though dozens if not hundreds of other passengers are mere inches away, they don't say a thing or intervene. And despite the numbers, she doesn't feel comfortable yelling or asking for help, and feels completely vulnerable and alone throughout the ordeal. When she gets off the train, a plainclothes police officer, having witnessed the crime, calls her over and asks her to identify the perpetrator, whom the officer has detained. The lady does so only reluctantly, fearing some sort of retaliation. The whole experience gives her a number of insecurities about interacting with the world, making her especially afraid of riding the train at rush hour.
You should definitely read the piece in full---I would never be able to capture or relay a harrowing episode like this with the same sense of pain, violation, shame, fear, and loneliness. I hope that her story did eventually end in some kind of more solid triumph. But sexual harassment is an all-too frequent occurrence on mass transit, certainly in places like NYC. Probably every woman in transit-oriented cities have their own story about this, and it adds to the reasons that people abandon public transportation. The piece raised a few important points with regard to what I've been thinking and writing about here. Despite everything the piece made me feel on a visceral level, I'll keep this discussion to one that's policy and planning oriented.
First, I wrote a few weeks ago about the "eyes on the street" concept of, for lack of a better word, community policing. Again, this is the notion that if you design a space so that there are people present at all times, passively keeping a watch over it, criminals are less likely to perpetrate crimes. This remains true; imagine what might happen without those eyes. But what about those other times, where dozens or even hundreds are watching, but that's still not enough to deter crimes, especially of a sexual harassment nature?
A famous story that comes to mind is one in which a woman named Kitty Genovese was violently assaulted and screamed for help, with a handful if not dozens of neighbors hearing what happened but not even moving a muscle to help her or call the police. The episode was later reported to have been exaggerated. Still, the scenario was tested under controlled circumstances: grey smoke was billowing out of a room and when there was a sole witness, ze called the fire department immediately. But when dozens of people walked by and all saw the same smoke, and watched other people seeing the same smoke, nobody was compelled to act. "If they're not concerned or doing anything about it, it's probably not a big deal. Why should I intervene either?"
There might be a similar dynamic at play in crowded subways: if other people see it, and are okay with this groping, it's probably not that big a deal, so why should I do anything? It's a strange sort of social paralysis brought on by embarrassment...of disturbing the stability of the status quo. (Or maybe people are just too crowded and wrapped up in their own minds to realize or care about what's happening to others around them?)
The first priority, of course, ought to be to teach men not to be lecherous or worse. More on that in a moment. Second, in addition to creating a space where women feel safe, we ought to create a space where witnesses feel safe and responsible to intervene in things they realize are wrong. Public policy can help shape that: signs and announcements in the NY subway have recently begun to exhort victims and witnesses to intervene, call police, and speak out when sexual harassment takes place; and remind riders that sexual harassment is indeed a crime that must be stopped. It'd be interesting to find stats on what kind of a dent that's made in interventions or reporting.
Then there are always the more subtle ways of intervening in a burgeoning problem without even making a big deal of it; this guy intervened in a fight just by casually walking in the middle while still eating his snack:
And this intervention is related to my second big takeaway from this Times piece: how pleasantly surprised I was to read that a police officer not only recognized that this happened, but also intervened and attempted to bring the criminal to some kind of justice. This does not happen enough: victims are blamed, or often not even recognized as victims and dismissed. In an ideal world, the official police would not have to have a role in enforcing gender violence norms, as the problem would be effectively dealt with by society. But in the world in which we live, law enforcement plays an extremely important function.
And getting law enforcement to care comes back to that "first priority" identified above: to teach men not to be lecherous or worse---and to teach people to intervene when they bear witness to a crime. Awareness really is the beginning of that, and sharing information a big component therein. In Egypt over the last few months, reports have shown that over 99.3% of women have been sexually harassed in their daily lives (with some particularly gruesome cases of gang rape and molestation), yet in less than 14% of those cases did someone try to help. Much as Chinese women have been able to take to Weibo to share information about this while saving face, the creators of HarassMap are trying to leverage technology to get Egyptians to share information about incidents and map them for better societal awareness. Actually seeing and hearing about incidents really brings it home to people in ways that matter; it's less of an abstract idea that happens to "someone else." Once that societal awareness and concern is strong, it would more easily filter up into police training, if it's still needed at that point.
Of course, coming back to the notion of culture and sexual aggression we'd discussed before, that awareness goes much deeper. Chris Kilmartin, author of "The Masculine Self," says that the source of sexual violence is a "cult of hyper-masculinity, which tells boys that aggression is natural and sexual conquest enviable, and a set of laws and language that cast women as inferior, pliable, even disposable...'we teach boys to disrespect the feminine and disrespect women. That’s the cultural undercurrent of rape.'" Try to tackle that, and we'll be riding on a much safer train.
But the first step to ending a huge problem is to recognize when it recurs right in front of all of our eyes.
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