This one time I got groped on an airplane.
I know. Of all the places – an airplane?
The culprit – the groper – was a 20-something European backpacker who seemed nice enough, judging by our pre-takeoff small talk, until I woke up 20 minutes into the flight with his hand on my thigh. Now, four months later, I don’t remember his name or what he looked like, just that he smelled like he hadn’t showered in a while and that his hands were like normal hands, until they touched me.
The experience was particularly horrifying because of its setting. On an airplane, you can’t get up and walk away, and you can’t call the police. You expect to be safe because you’re surrounded by people, but the other guy in our row didn’t react when I swatted the groper’s hand away, except to conspicuously bury his nose in his magazine. You could practically see a neon sign blinking above his head: “Not my business.”
Another downside of sexual assault on planes: I then had to spend another hour next to the guy. Sure, he didn’t put his hands on me again, but he kept spreading his legs so his thigh rested against mine, and once he leaned over and whispered that I could use his shoulder as a headrest if I wanted. I sat there, pinned between the airplane window and the Creep, less scared than I was utterly bewildered. Did he really consider his behavior appropriate? Did he think I’d been flirting with him? Was our brief conversation about Neil Gaiman novels some kind of signal to him that he had total access to my body?
I still don’t know the answers. Once the plane landed, a lifetime later, I got away and rejoined my group, which consisted of my fellow study abroad students who had also ventured on the weekend trip to Scotland; most of them women as well. I told them what had happened, and in a show of typically feminine solidarity and righteous outrage, they surrounded me, shielding me from any further uninvited advances by the Creep.
This was the worst bit: To reassure me, the girls started sharing their own stories about sexual assault in public places. Every one of them had experienced it. They’d been catcalled or harassed or groped, on the street or on TRAX or on the bus. Nowhere was safe.
Sexual assault is horribly common. According to a 2012 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in five women have been raped in their lifetime. Nineteen percent of college-aged women will also experience sexual assault. However, those numbers are probably skewed because many women – myself included – don’t report an assault to the police.
In public spaces, the numbers are even worse. A Telegraph article reports that a recent survey shows 100 percent of French women on public transit have been victims of sexual harassment. And according to a study by the Thomas Reuters Foundation, the Paris Metro isn’t even the most used system of public transportation for women. Paris is all the way down at No. 11.
So what does that tell you about sexual assault on public transit? That it happens, it happens a lot and it pretty much happens to all women. Salt Lake City is no exception. It might be subtle (a strange man pressing himself against a woman’s body), or loud (catcalls), or it might not even look like sexual harassment at all. We all know those guys on TRAX who insist on sitting next to women, even if there are empty seats available elsewhere, who initiate pointless conversations with women, even if the woman has headphones in, and who take offense if women tell them to get lost. And women rarely blow them off — they can’t risk it. The guy might have a knife or a gun. He could do practically anything he wanted, and in most cases, you can only rely on other people to sit back and watch. The same TRF study showed that 87 percent of women in Seoul, Korea “were not confident fellow passengers would come to their assistance.”
We’d all like to think we’re different, that we would step up to stop an assault, but the numbers make liars of us. We don’t step up. We don’t speak out. As a result, public transportation is becoming one of the most dangerous places for women. For the most part, women don’t need rescuers, but they do need supporters who are willing to make it clear that sexual harassment isn’t acceptable, and it definitely shouldn’t be normal.