Public transit a harassment trap for girls
Krisya Ceja gets anxious when she’s on public transportation, where she often has to dodge men invading her personal space and asking for her phone number or Instagram handle. “I’m telling them I’m underage, and they still persist,” said Krisya, a 17yearold senior at Life Academy in East Oakland. “I have to make sure I know where the nearest exit is.”
One weekend afternoon last summer, she couldn’t get away. She was on BART traveling to a family event in San Francisco. The train car was nearly empty, she said, so she took a window seat and put her headphones on.
“This guy chose to sit right next to me, and he tried to talk to me,” she said. “I was scared to ask to move, because I felt that he would get offended. I was scared for my safety.”
The man slid his hand underneath the jacket on his lap and began touching himself.
She felt powerless as she stared out the window.
“I didn’t want to know what was going on,” said Krisya, who recalled feeling like she was having a panic attack as she texted with a friend.
Nobody should get harassed in public spaces, but harassment is a reality shared — endured, really — by girls and women when they travel alone. Since the tragic slaying of Nia Wilson on the MacArthur BART Station platform, I’ve thought a lot about
what girls and women have to navigate when riding public transportation — the catcalls, the stares, the inappropriate touching, the threats of violence.
I met Krisya last week at a meeting about public transportation safety hosted by Alliance for Girls, the nation’s largest association of girls organizations that serves 300,000 people annually. The meeting, which included representatives from more than a dozen member organizations, was organized so girls could share their experiences about riding BART — and their solutions to make girls feel safer.
In August, Alliance for Girls released a report titled “Together, We Rise: The Lived Experiences of Girls of Color in Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose.” According to the report, girls in each city said they’d been harassed and stalked on public transportation.
“Girls know that this is an issue, and we ignore it until it’s too late,” said Emma Mayerson, the executive director of Alliance for Girls. “Public transportation is one of the greatest barriers to access services, to basic mobility, to economic empowerment.”
A 2019 report jointly released by four organizations, including the UC San Diego Center on Gender Equity and Health, found that 77% of women surveyed had been sexually harassed in a public space. Twentynine percent said it happened on public transportation.
BART logged 535 reports of sexual assault and lewd behavior on its BART Watch app this year through October. During the same period in 2018, there were 501 reports.
BART was the first Bay Area transit organization to sit down with Alliance for Girls. Bob Powers, BART’s general manager, was there. He received a copy of “Together, We Rise” when a girl spotted him at one of his listening tour stops.
Three female BART police officers also attended the meeting at Betti Ono Gallery on Broadway in Oakland, along with Matt Burrows, BART’s general counsel, and Alicia Trost, BART’s chief communications officer.
We should all be listening to what the girls are telling us. A trip to school, work or a friend’s house shouldn’t require an escort or an escape plan.
“While we are providing direct service and programming and healing, we also need to make sure that in the next 10 years we’re not seeing the same issues,” Haleema Bharoocha, Alliance for Girls’ advocacy manager, told me.
The girls want safeguards and assurances. How long would it take for help to arrive if they pressed a panic button? Will there be consequences for inappropriate behavior?
“This is a majority of lowincome young women of color from around the Bay Area who have taken it upon themselves to not only survey other women, but to come up with recommendations,” said Lateefah Simon, the president of BART’s board. “They’re saying we actually have a vision of what safety looks like.”
Simon has two daughters. One rides BART to San Francisco for work every day.
“The access that women have to safety in public spaces period is difficult,” she said.
When Krisya passed Simon on her way out the door from the public safety meeting, Simon told her to “hold us accountable.”
Krisya, a cofounder of a girls group that supports Latinas in schools, is focused on doing just that.
“We’re in an era where it’s like these things are going on and we need to address them,” she said. “I’m glad to be a part of this movement and that I can do something to prevent what I went through.”