Judith Woods Women-only carriages? That’s victim blaming
Like many other women, I have been assaulted on public transport. It was years ago, in an almost empty Tube carriage, when a man came and, despite the availability of seats, settled down right beside me.
He carefully laid his anorak over his lap, fiddled with his trousers then grabbed my hand and pulled it over and under the jacket.
It was so shocking and happened so fast that I was speechless – until my fingers touched clammy flesh, when I shrieked and violently withdrew. I recall shouting at him and telling him to get away, to go away. He didn’t, just fixed his gaze downwards. Nobody asked if I was all right or offered to help. I hastily stood up and at the next stop tearfully stumbled into the next carriage, where I continued my journey unmolested, if badly shaken.
If the Labour Party front bench had their way, this would never have happened, because there would be separate carriages. Not for the lechers and sexual deviants, which has merit, but for women.
It was an opinion voiced in 2015 by Jeremy Corbyn. Now it has been aired again by his front bench MP Chris Williamson, in the wake of a horrendous attack on a 17-year-old festivalgoer who was assaulted on a train and then, when she sought help, assaulted again by a second man.
Two terrible crimes, but enough for Labour to consider clamping down on women’s freedom to travel? Apparently so, despite the justified howls of outrage from backbenchers such as Jess Phillips and Stella Creasy.
It would be as out-and-out laughable as Harriet Harman’s pink battle bus were it not such a dangerous reflection of how this backward iteration of the Labour Party regards women; with at best suspicion, and at worst antipathy.
Last year, two female Labour members confronted Corbyn personally to say they didn’t feel safe in the party due to misogynistic abuse within its left wing. As recently as February of this year, there was online debate about Labour’s “women problem”; I suspect these proposals may be a projection of that unease.
After my own frightening encounter, I oscillated wildly between distress, revulsion and anger. My thoughts were confused. But not that confused.
“If only there were a special carriage right at the back of this train where I could be tucked out of sight, and the perverts of this world could travel in peace,” I did not think.
I also did not think, “I wish there were female-only carriages because that is where women belong on public transport.” At no point did it occur to me for a moment that segregation was the solution to the wrong sort of sleazeballs on the line.
More conductors, yes. More awareness among fellow passengers that looking away is not a civilised option.
Maybe even a public safety campaign so a universally recognised “lech alert” button could be pressed, sending out a plume of indelible paint on to the perpetrator’s groin. But for
Labour, it would seem I am the problem and bustling away 52 per cent of the population is the solution, because what can you do about perverts, eh?
I mean, really, when has political will, tighter policing, draconian penalties and rigorous prison sentences ever been useful in tackling crime? I can just see Corbyn in his vest on his soapbox crying: “Forget about catching perpetrators, comrades, let’s round up the potential victims and put them where we can see them!”
Perhaps he will also introduce carriages to cover every possible hate crime while we’re at it. Who would cheer at the sight of an ethnic minority carriage, a transgender or disabled carriage? Nobody, that’s who.
Any such notion is anathema to all right-thinking people. It smacks of totalitarianism, of intolerance, of fascism. So why are women being targeted in this way? Maybe there’s a clue in the recent announcement by Alison Saunders, Director of Public Prosecutions, that online hate crime will be treated as seriously as those committed face-to-face.
Race, religion and disability were mentioned; misogyny was not. At best, it was a crass oversight, at worst it bespoke a misplaced complacency that we have reached a point of equality where gender is off the agenda and no longer an issue.
Tell that to high-profile women who suffer rape warnings and obscene threats of sexual violence on a daily basis, such as author Caroline Criadoperez, who was viciously trolled for campaigning to have Jane Austen on our £10 banknote.
Labour have blown their own cover by exposing their deep wellspring of macho chauvinism that has no place in 21st-century Britain. Women are entitled to travel in safety because all citizens have a right to be protected; not isolated, sidelined and discriminated against because a tiny minority of men are scumbags.
Even the logic is flawed. Given that women comprise 52 per cent of the population, would they get 52 per cent of the carriage space? If a woman chose not to travel in a “safe” carriage, would that make her culpable if an assault took place? Especially if she wasn’t, say, “covered up”?
It’s not such a leap of imagination as it first appears. Face veils are imposed in fundamentalist communities for women’s “protection”, after all. And in chauvinist societies where they have low status and few rights, covering up probably is the best way to avoid attack.
But watch the films of Syrian women triumphantly burning the burkas forced on them under Isil rule and it sends up in flames the pernicious myth that all women of faith choose to conceal themselves.
And what is a women-only carriage but an abject admission of failure? Such carriages are available in Brazil, Mexico, Russia and Egypt. Has Britain reached the point where we need to follow their cues in “protecting” women from men, all of whom are effectively being considered potential rapists?
That is arrant nonsense. I was victim of an assault, but I am not a victim. I feel angry that politicians would restrict my freedoms rather than safeguarding them. As far as I am concerned, the only woman problem here resides deep within the Labour Party.