One writer’s tooclose-for-comfort commute

There’s a secret police force whose job it is to keep you safe from sexual predators on public transport. CATRIONA INNES went along for the ride

Excuse me, Miss, can I ask if there was anything odd about your journey today?” The girl looks hesitant. Confused. She frowns, as if she’s thinking of the right answer. “Umm,” she pauses. “Something did keep poking into my bum... an umbrella, maybe?” You might have felt an “umbrella” at some point in your life. Or maybe the corner of a “bag”. At certain times of the year, perhaps “a roll of wrapping paper”. When you’re on a rush-hour train or bus, your fellow commuters packed in around you like (angry, honeyless) bees in a hive, it can be hard to tell. So you ignore the persistent prodding in your left bum cheek, or the top of your thigh. You ignore the little voice in your head that says “this isn’t right”. You convince yourself that you’re wrong, it isn’t what you think it is, and even if it is – hey, it’s a busy train, you’re sure he doesn’t mean to…

Sometimes you might be right. But for this girl, standing on this platform, the rumbling of Tubes interrupting her conversation with a police officer at 6.20pm on a Wednesday, it was no umbrella.

I knew this sort of stuff happened. That there are men who rub their erect penises on unsuspecting women on public transport. I’ve lived in capital cities my whole life (first Edinburgh, now London) – it’s a running topic of conversation among my friends. But we thought that these men were chancers, taking advantage of the close proximity a commute offers them. We also thought that there was nothing we could do about it, that it was part and parcel of our daily journeys. Sometimes you get an armpit in your face, other times it’s a penis on your leg. Hey-ho!

We were wrong, on both counts. Something I only learned after spending time with an undercover police force known as The Grope Police (OK, so I call them this, their actual title is Project Guardian). Created by the British Transport Police and TFL in 2013 after it was revealed that one in seven women had been sexually assaulted on public transport, it’s this group’s job to catch these men in the act.

You would never spot them. But they’re out there, during the morning and evening rush hour, blending in with the crowds. It’s not just the penis-rubbers they’re after either, but the gropers, the flashers, the up-skirters, the masturbators… turns out there’s a whole host of sexual predators roaming the underground for their kicks. And they’re anything but chancers.

ON PATROL

Oxford Circus’s Central Line platform at 5pm is a place where no one would want to spend very long. The heat is desert-like, but there are no mirages: just sweating Londoners being engulfed by the warm, dusty air that comes whooshing in with every new Tube arrival. There are faces and bodies everywhere I look: and they’re all pushing, shoving and tutting at me as I try to stand still, observing those around me, trying to identify gropers.

This is the second shift of the day for The Grope Police. They were out this morning looking for the early-bird gropers: those who take advantage of the AM crowds. And now they’re back, intentionally placing themselves on the busiest line, and the busiest spot. Why? Because the men they’re looking for (and it is men – the team are yet to catch a woman through this operation) thrive in crowds. Crowds mean victims are trapped, that there’s nowhere for them to move to. Crowds allow them to place the blame on other people… or umbrellas.

But my desperate searching for someone who simply looks like a groper (oil-slick black hair, stained trousers, spitty lips, obviously) won’t get me very far. The team of four that I am out with today are looking for behaviours. Tiny movements and decisions that a normal commuter just wouldn’t make.

“If they’re not looking up to see when the next train is, we want to know why,” explains Leanne,* a kind-faced brunette in sequinned trainers and double denim. She looks like she could be on her way to collect her daughter from school. In fact, she’s a surveillance-trained officer, who’s been on the force for the past 20 years. “Or if we spot them getting on a train and then coming back to the same spot again, or entering the busier areas of the platform.”

And so the force – like a pack of meerkats, their necks a little longer than most, their eyes darting back and forth – stand and take everything in. Then there is sudden movement: they spot a suspect and they all dart onto a train seconds before its doors close. I do my best to keep up. But I’m so focused on keeping an eye on the others that I have no idea who we are chasing. I’m told he is wearing a hat. There are lots of men in hats. Is it the elderly gentleman in the tweed flatcap? Is that why no one is offering him a seat? Two stops down and a signal is sent, and suddenly, we’re off the train.

“Something did keep poking into my bum…”

“The Gaffer”, Ian,* sidles up beside me. The boss, he’s got 14 years’ experience and has a super-human ability to recognise faces. Back in the office, the team have hundreds of CCTV shots of suspects, built up from various reports, that they’re

always on the lookout for. The Hat Man, Ian explains, was “just a looker” – and they can’t arrest someone for staring. They have to see someone specifically in the act before they can step in.“We don’t want girls to get assaulted but…” he says, shrugging. The team have to be very careful, witnessing just enough to intervene, and asking the victim open-ended questions. Even when boarding trains they can’t push too much, for fear the groper will blame them, say they pushed them and – oops! – their “umbrella” just so happened to land there.

“We once followed a man for six hours. He was jumping from train to train, looking [at] and assessing girls on each,” explains Stuart,* who with his stocky build and conker-coloured hair looks like a 1997 extra from The Bill. “He was definitely up to something, but he just didn’t act.”

The team regale me with stories of those they have caught: there was the man who, on his way home for dinner with his wife, rubbed his penis against two Japanese school girls while still carrying his shopping from Waitrose. (“The fish was worth £35… I put it in the fridge for his wife to collect.”) The hipster with a topknot who cut a hole in his grey jogging bottoms so he could masturbate on trains. The Russian businessman who ran down the platform when he spotted a male Chinese teenager (“I pulled open his coat, saw his erection and said, ‘You’re coming with me’”).

ON THE HUNT

Hat Man has now been replaced by Blue Jumper. He was spotted wandering up the platform, deliberately placing himself in among the busier crowds. We follow him onto two trains, or is it three? I have absolutely no idea where he is. Where I am. But they do. And they know him.

He gets off the train we’re on and heads to the opposite platform. Leanne stays put.“He’ll probably come back,” she tells me. Maybe it wasn’t busy enough, or there wasn’t a woman there, but she’s right. We wait. He comes back, apparently. I follow the group once again onto a train, trusting that he’s nearby somewhere.

Then, in a split-second, there’s a small commotion. A woman jumps on, just as the doors are closing, and gets her arm trapped – in a bid to free her, her friend elbows me in the face. Another man opposite me – short, stocky, wearing a jumper and jeans – asks if I’m OK. We begin to chat politely, in that way you do with strangers. He seems nice. He gets off the train and I say a cheery goodbye to him, and then I notice Leanne getting off, too. Once on the platform, I’m still a little dazed, and she tells me I have to hang back. I’m confused, but then slowly it dawns on me: the man in the jumper I’ve just made small talk with. The man in the BLUE JUMPER.

I don’t have to hang back for long, though. That’s the other thing about gropers: they’re so focused on the task in hand that they are totally unaware of the faces around them. Soon I’m back in the same carriage as him. He doesn’t even notice me.

This train is packed. And, to the innocent eye, it’s full of commuters. Except clustered in a circle around Blue Jumper is the force. And, as he settles himself into position, in front of a girl in pink trousers, they are all staring at his crotch.

His hands are above his head, gripping the mustard-yellow pole above him. Everything about him is angled in one specific direction. Then he steps back. Leanne has seen enough. She nods to the others and Pink Trousers and Blue Jumper are asked to get off the train. The girl complies, quietly stepping onto the platform.

Blue Jumper is less willing.“I didn’t do anything,” he begins to yell. “I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING! TELL ME WHAT I DID…” He grips the pole above him tightly and refuses to get off. Three members of the force have to drag him off and onto a bench. There he continues his protests. Tired of his whining, Leanne walks over, stern-faced: “You had a semi. I saw it. Now will you just co-operate?” He falls silent.

He’s taken away, while Leanne and I question the victim. She tells us about this “thing” pressing against her, and agrees to speak to the police on the phone later that night. As she walks away, Leanne says to me: “She definitely wouldn’t have reported that.”

I suddenly feel conflicted: have we just taken an uncomfortable situation on this girl’s daily commute, and turned it into a sexual assault? Had we not been there she could have carried on, kidding herself it was just a bag or an umbrella.

But this is the problem. I, like most of the women I know, have normalised some forms of sexual assault or harassment. We’ve weaved them so tightly into the patchwork quilt of our life, it feels too difficult to unpick. So we just accept it. Perhaps as a form of self-protection, or perhaps because, for a long time, we thought we wouldn’t be believed. Those one in seven women assaulted in 2013? 90% of them didn’t report it.

This, of course, was before #MeToo. Before the outpouring of stories on social media: everything ranging from the horrific to the smaller stories, the ones, at the time, we all brushed off as “no big deal”. I shared

“You had a semi. I saw it. Now just co-operate”

my own: when I was 19 a man snaked his fingers into my knickers while I was queuing to collect my coat in a nightclub. I did go to the police, only to be asked what underwear I was wearing, how much I’d had to drink and then be told “you could pursue it, but it would take a lot of time… and we probably won’t catch the guy”. I felt silly for going to the station in the first place, went home, slept and tried to forget it ever happened.

Now I often wonder what that man did next. Because these “small” instances are rarely the whole picture. We take Blue Jumper into a back office of Liverpool Street Station, where it’s discovered that he was caught, and cautioned, for similar behaviour five years ago. That’s five years of him hooking his foot around a woman’s leg, so she can’t move, while he rubs himself against her. And when that’s not enough for him, who knows what else he could do? A different man they’d arrested previously had his details crossreferenced: he was wanted for a series of rapes. All the officers agree that the type of behaviour these men indulge in is compulsive, as well as escalating.

And even if the “only” thing Blue Jumper did during those five years was rub himself up against women, why should we just shrug and accept it? This force believes we absolutely shouldn’t, and a lot of work has gone into making it easier to catch these men. Those they have caught in the past have been served with prison sentences, placed on the sexual offenders register and had orders served that stop them from travelling at certain times of day, or being near women on public transport.

It’s incredibly refreshing to hear that all this is going on behind the scenes, dressed in plain clothes. Because despite it being the era of #MeToo, the world still seems to support sexual offenders over their victims. After all, 16 allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour have done Donald Trump no harm, Roman Polanski is still widely celebrated and Louis CK is preparing to make his comeback.

But there are a small group of people who will listen. Whose only aim is to make public transport a hostile environment for these men, not their victims. Not all heroes wear capes, or uniforms. Some wear sequinned trainers.