A 21-year-old university student has launched a campaign calling for women-only carriages to be introduced in the London Underground to protect against sexual harassment
A student has launched a campaign calling for the London Underground to introduce women-only carriages.
21-year-old UCL student Camille Brown set up a petition calling for Sadiq Khan and Transport for London (TfL) to protect women by introducing at least one women-only carriage on all tube lines. At the time of writing, the petition has almost 9,000 signatures. After 10,000 signatures, petitions get a response from the government.
Camille, who grew up in London, wrote in her petition: “Public harassment of women on the London Underground is a growing issue, and TFL’s approach is failing – we always see it, we do say it, but it’s still not sorted.”
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Reported sexual offences have risen year on year by more than 10% on Tubes, trains and buses across the capital, as per the BBC. In figures given in response to a Freedom of Information request, Tfl revealed that there were 2,671 sexual offences on the network reported to the police between February 2023 and January 2024.
TfL said that this same period saw an increase in total passenger numbers as part of a post-pandemic bounceback and that the growing number of reports was “anticipated” on the back of an anti-harassment poster campaign.
However, there are other figures which suggest gender-based harassment is a pervasive issue on public transport. A 2023 survey by the British Transport Police suggested that over a third of women have been a victim of sexual harassment or offences while commuting by train or tube.
Meanwhile, a recent Girlguiding survey found that 56% of girls and young women aged 11-21 say they don’t feel safe on public transport on their own, a figure which has risen by over 10% since 2022. The report also found that 31% of girls have avoided travelling on public transport alone completely.
Camille shared that, growing up, she was required to send a daily ‘SAS’ message to her family WhatsApp chat – which stood for ‘Safely At School’. She added: “It wasn’t until I was 13 that I fully understood why my parents were so concerned about my solo route to school.
“I distinctly remember, to this day, being about to get off the Circle Line at Baker Street and a man harassing me to spend the day with him, instead of going to school. I was utterly terrified and the thought that kept coming into my mind was ‘but I’m in school uniform?’ Unfortunately, even that is not armour enough to protect against intimidation, harassment or even assault.”
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She added: “It was not a rare occurrence for girls at my school to arrive in tears from having experienced or witnessed something traumatising on the underground.”
However, despite of the campaign, TFL have stated that they do not plan to introduce women-only carriages. Siwan Hayward, TfL’s Director of Security, Policing and Enforcement, told The Mirror: “Everyone should feel and be safe when travelling across the network, but isolating women is not the answer to tackling sexual offenses.
“We do not support any proposal for female-only train carriages on TfL services, but instead are working closely with the police to ensure our capital’s transport network is a hostile place for offenders, including the use of intelligence-led policing operations to target offenders and hotspot locations.
“Women and girls should feel able to come forward and report any incident, confident that they will be taken seriously and that action will be taken. That’s why we have been working with the British Transport Police over many years to raise awareness of this issue, to help customers feel more empowered to report this behaviour. While we anticipated and welcome increased reporting, any incidence of sexual harassment is utterly unacceptable and we are working hard to stamp it out on our network.
“We encourage anyone who experiences or witnesses this behaviour to report it to the police or a member of staff, so that we can take action against offenders and ensure preventative measures are in place.”
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