Women-only train carriages: full steam ahead?

More than 30,000 people in France have signed a petition calling for women-only train carriages, after a young woman recounted her attempted rape on a Paris commuter train. The petition has “provoked angry debate” in France, a society that’s “long viewed sex-segregated spaces as an affront to its – at least theoretical – ideal of equality”, said The Times.

In the UK, a similar petition calls on Transport for London and Sadiq Khan to make the same change on the Tube and London Overground. In under a month, it has surpassed the 10,000 signatures needed to trigger a formal government response.

But introducing women-only carriages would “unwind a century of progress”, said Emma Schubart in The Telegraph. “The petitioners are right about the problem. They’re wrong about the solution.”

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‘Failing half the city’

I have had “negative experiences at the hands of men on public transport and so have a lot of my close girl mates”, said “Love Island” star Georgia Harrison in The Mirror. Women-only carriages “shouldn’t be looked at negatively, like women having to segregate themselves”. If I’m going home late at night and I’m on my own, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t have” that option.

With violence and sexual offences against women on public transport rising – more than 900 sexual offences were reported on Transport for London’s services in the first half of this year alone – it is undeniable that the captial’s transport system is “failing half the city”, said Schubart in The Telegraph. But introducing women-only carriages “dodges the root cause” – it “tells offenders nothing needs to change” and punishes victims instead of potential perpetrators.

“Women should not have to take action to prevent sexual assault,” said feminist campaigner Julie Bindel in The Spectator in 2022. Instead, “men should be stopped from doing so”. If “we put the emphasis on women’s behaviour, rather than the attitudes that underpin such crimes, nothing will change”.

‘Entrench backward norms’

Cities like Tokyo, Mumbai and Rio already have women-only carriages in place but the results are “hardly reassuring”, said Schubart. In Rio, for example harassment declined in the women-only spaces but not on the rest of the network, a recent study showed. Worse, the change seemed to “entrench backwards norms”, with women who chose to ride in mixed cars seen as “sexually open or inviting”.

If Sadiq Khan wants London to mirror what other cities have done to combat sexual violence and harassment, he should “copy the serious bits. That means visible staff and patrols, faster response, better lighting and CCTV” and better reporting. “If the goal is to make women feel safe on the Tube, the way to do it is to make predators feel very unsafe.”

I recently “interviewed women about their experiences on trains and it made for some grim conversations”, said HuffPost’s Rachel Moss. I learned what measures would make them feel safer: “more staff, more station lighting, and more robust education for men. Not one expressed a desire to be penned into a separate carriage.”

Ultimately, if you aren’t addressing the “systems of oppression and inequality that fuel the warped beliefs of perpetrators”, you’re not fixing the issue; “you’re just pushing it further down the track”.