The ongoing issue of the safety of women & girls - and the jarring lack of action
In recent weeks, the AFFC team has repeatedly come across more and more articles, tweets, research papers and so on discussing the issues around the safety of women and girls. It should be no surprise to us, as this is a critical issue and the focus of our current project, A Fleet For Safety, which will get women and vulnerable people home safe at night. Here are some thoughts on where we’re at, and what needs to change.
From smaller, more localised research, such as the Tonbridge and Malling Borough Survey to help women and girls feel safe, to the BBC asking the public on X (formerly known as Twitter) to write in about how they experience the same issues as tragically faced by Sarah Everard 3 years ago, it's clear we’re still looking at the same problems. As Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper says,
“The first women's safety marches were in Leeds nearly 50 yrs ago - yet we still have the same conversations today.”
Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.
She goes on to remark about the need for a multi-agency approach to tackle the issue of women’s safety:
“It has to involve everybody, it has to involve government, it has to involve local government, it has to involve the police, it has to involve communities, it has to involve society, it has to involve online tech giants.”
AFFC’s own human-led research as part of an Innovate UK-funded research project has focused on understanding the root causes of people’s fears and perceptions over the safety of public transport and PT infrastructure, with intelligent, innovative solutions being created alongside potential service users. We pride ourselves on building a service which is preventative rather than reactive - ie removing the risk associated with exposure (walking time) or travelling alone in a private hire vehicle.
For a start, it's worth remembering that taxis - especially with surge fares and higher costs due to clean air zones, are prohibitively expensive for a huge portion of the population.
For those sceptics thinking jumping in an taxi is a safe option, the stats from TfL are a stark reminder that it isn’t always the case:
2021 recorded crime figures
In 2021, this equated to 3-4 women being assaulted or raped in taxi and private-hire vehicles, per week, in London alone. More info from TfL on this, and the measures they’re putting in place to prevent and report Violence Against Women and Girls (VWAG). (A note on this: sadly, the tight-fisted, ring-fencing of subsidised transport sitting firmly within the capital, leaves councils beyond its borders to fight their own fights for solutions - without the funding that makes TfL so successful).
With the tagline “British Transport Police want more reports; women just want to get home safe”, this Cosmopolitan article makes for difficult reading (I’ll be sending it to a few men in my life who perhaps don’t yet grasp the nature of the problem). In parts it may seem a little sensationalist, but these are real women’s stories, and the regularity of these kinds of assaults is well supported within the article by figures from good sources. Though it focuses on trains and tubes - as many articles coming from our major cities do - it discusses the nature of the attacks undergone by women - this is the experiential evidence that really pushes change - we must listen to the problem:
“official report data spanning August 2021 and September 2023, shows BTP recorded 5,946 sexual offences on trains, trams and tubes across its network (“not buses, we don’t do buses – that’s for local police” – an officer later tells me).”
The problem, unfortunately, is on the rise. The Andrew Tate effect - in which younger people are embracing misogyny and outdated values of women and girls as property and of lesser value than men has been well reported. The long-term impact of that remains to be seen.
The Cosmopolitan article, Yvette Cooper, BBC Morning Live and the Tonbridge & Malling Consultation
So….where are the figures for the assaults on buses? TfL holds the reports for individual boroughs, but again, that’s sporadic information within the limits of London.
The much-lauded Sheffield Women and Girls Night-Time Safety Charter has unfortunately led to little or no observable action, being limited to hospitality venues, dependent on individual business in-house training, and anecdotally at least, has largely been forgotten about.
And why are we still thinking of reactive measures, rather than proactive?
As the Cosmo article states, “in 2023, the damning 363-page Casey Review found the Metropolitan Police to be institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic. There’s a lot of work to be done across all forces to regain faith in the system.”
So how do we go about systemic change? For a start, we need to look at who’s calling the shots - having more representatives for women in government and across all industries can only be a good thing. According to Women in Transport, only 26% of workers in the transport sector are women, with only 12% of bus drivers identifying as women, according to government statistics. At A Fleet For Change, we firmly believe that women need to be at the table when the decisions are made, and those women need to be representative of the service users, the drivers, and those who have a very real fear of public transport in the first place.
We’re working alongside local councils, groups including Women In Transport, Better Buses South Yorkshire, and multiple universities, and the wider community, to ensure we continue to engage with those whom our services have the most potential to meaningfully impact.
If you’d like to be involved in A Fleet For Change, to suggest any associations you think it would be beneficial to partner with, or to engage with our team about your own experiences, please contact us on our Get Involved page.
