taxi Archives | Stop Street Harassment

South Africa: The Safe Ride Campaign

October 23, 2016 By HKearl

Nyasha Joyce Mukuwane, Johannesburg, South Africa, SSH Blog Correspondent

taxi3 — Pictures courtesy of Sonke Gender Justice

Abusive male passengers and taxi drivers can make riding public transport in Johannesburg a harrowing experience for a woman. More often than not, a woman faces harassment or sexual abuse aboard a taxi. Taxi drivers and the queue marshals have a notorious reputation for this and there have been many recorded and unrecorded incidents of verbal abuse, harassment, physical violence, sexual assault and rape of girls and women whilst using taxis. One lady spoke to me about how some men thought it funny to poke her breast and how paralysed with fear she felt as she could not stand up and leave the taxi. The other passengers simply looked on and ignored that she was being harassed.

Fortunately, there is a new campaign to change this.

Sonke Gender Justice is a NGO working across Africa to strengthen government, civil society and citizen capacity to promote gender equality, prevent domestic and sexual violence, and reduce the spread and impact of HIV and AIDS. On the 17^th of August 2016, they partnered with the South African National Taxi Council (SANTACO), with support from the Danish Embassy, to launch the Safe Ride campaign. The goal of the campaign is to prevent and respond to the abuse of women and girls at the hands of taxi personnel, including drivers and queue marshals.

The Johannesburg launch of the campaign was the beginning of a year-long programme that will traverse the country to educate the taxi community about how they can help prevent and stop harassment and sexual violence against women and children. Over the next year, supported by funding from the Danish Embassy, the Safe Ride campaign will host events with taxi drivers, queue marshals and commuters in all nine provinces. They are also planning a few three day intensive training sessions for drivers and their assistants on gender-based violence, how to report such incidents and where survivors can go to for help.

This is one of the most innovative campaigns in Johannesburg to challenge patriarchal beliefs, change the way that taxi drivers deal with street harassment, and promote active citizenry against street harassment.

Nyasha is the public awareness coordinator at the Nisaa Institute for Women’s Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, where the main goal is counselling and sheltering survivors of domestic abuse. She has edited two books by survivors that are available to download for free from the website www.nisaa.org.za.

South Africa: How Johannesburg Infrastructure and Transport Systems Contribute to Street Harassment

September 20, 2016 By Correspondent

Nyasha Joyce Mukuwane, Johannesburg, South Africa, SSH Blog Correspondent

Johannesburg is marketed as a world-class African city. In many ways it is, with a burgeoning middle class population and tourist and cultural attractions. High rise buildings in Sandton have turned it into a millionaire’s playground and it has been named Africa’s richest square mile. Precincts such as Maboneng are where the hipsters and the creative go to play and the nightlife extends very late via restaurants, pubs and clubs all over Johannesburg.

However, what is not world-class is the treatment of women on the streets who are running, walking, and going about their daily lives. What the tourist bureaus don’t show is the vulnerability of women and children in poorer areas who have to travel a long distance to school, the clinic and to places of employment. The average under-privileged woman experiences constant street harassment and threats of potential violence against her.

Johannesburg has been identified as a disorderly city with the worst instance of urban sprawl in South Africa, therefore a car is a necessity. It is a necessity as a 90 minute commute is halved with a car. Simple daily tasks such as school runs, grocery shopping and attending classes are completed easily. Owning a car in Johannesburg helps you keep up with the fast pace of the city, allowing you to enjoy what the city has to offer and most importantly, a woman’s exposure to harassment on the streets is reduced. Urban sprawl and the public transport system leave women vulnerable to street harassment.

Public transport system

Owning a car is simply out of reach for women who are lowly paid without steady streams of income. The majority of people who need to commute around Johannesburg make use of mini buses which are called taxis. These taxis transport people from farm holdings, informal settlements, townships and urban areas. They are convenient and relatively inexpensive. However many women have been harassed, humiliated, groped and assaulted by taxi drivers and other male passengers.

The train can also be another harrowing experience. The most horrifying tale I heard is a woman realizing that a stranger had ejaculated on her skirt in a packed train ride. Personal space does not exist aboard a Metrorail train. In stark contrast to the sleek, smooth running Gautrain, most disadvantaged women use the Metrorail to get around. The Gautrain has stops at 10 stations where only privileged people would find it convenient, like heading to financial hubs or the airport.

The typical work day of a woman in a township called Orange Farm would have her wake up before dawn to get a taxi. The majority of Orange Farm doesn’t have streetlights. The first taxi of the day that will drop her off at the Metrorail station as it is too far to walk. Besides that, there is long grass along the road. The train takes her to the CBD where she takes another taxi to get to her place of employment in Sandton. All modes of transportation will pose their own potential threats of harassment and sexual violence against her. It will take at least two hours for her to get to work in the morning if there are no incidents with the train schedule or traffic. Then she has to travel another two hours again after work, in the dark, 6 days a week, every month – all the time.

Street harassment is not necessarily seen as an issue to be dealt with by authorities and often law enforcement is not proactive but rather reactionary to incidences of escalated street harassment, such as assault or rape. The Nisaa Institute for Women’s Development works in Orange Farm where community members identified a stretch of veld with dumped garbage and long grass where men are raping and mugging women and a woman’s dead body had been found previously. With Nisaa’s support, community members mobilized themselves and cleared the area of debris and long grass. City officials and the local councillor promised that a park w0uld be put in place to make the area safer. That was in 2013 and they are still waiting. The community members have since become demoralized.

Picture courtesy of Nisaa Institute for Women’s Development

Disadvantaged women face street harassment everyday because of the spaces they occupy and the modes of transport they use. Townships were deliberately placed in inconvenient areas to keep people of colour from spaces of privilege by the apartheid government. A privileged woman is not completely immune to street harassment but her material possessions such as a car and the exclusive spaces in which she moves around in create a buffer against street harassment — whether real or imagined. She has the luxury of letting her guard down once in a while. In a literal tale of two cities, I ask again: Is Johannesburg truly a world-class African city?

Chariots for Hire, No Groping Buttons and Other Ways to Make Transit Safer

April 13, 2016 By HKearl

The ride-sharing service Chariots for Women will be launching nationwide on April 19 as an alternative to Uber and Lyft. In this model, all drivers and customers will be women to “ensure safety, comfort, and pleasure.”

Since stories about sexual violence of women at the hands of male Uber and Lyft drivers and taxi drivers are not uncommon, it’s understandable that there is a market for such a service. Indeed, I’ve supported a similar but free service called RightRides in both New York City and Washington, D.C. On select nights, women and LGBQTI-identified people can receive a safe, affordable late-night-ride home.

In San Francisco, a similar service called Homobiles offers rides that are free, with a donation suggested, to members of the LGBTIQQ community, who similarly may feel unsafe or discriminated against by drivers or be unable to pay for expensive taxi fares.

I understand why these services exist and many countries offer some form of women-only public transportation. But I do not believe that these kinds of women-only or LGBTIQQ-only services should be the ultimate goal. They are problematic for many reasons. Namely, they do not address the root causes of harassment and sexual assault, and they place the onus on these communities to keep themselves safe.

But there are no quick-fixes and easy answers for making public transportation (or any public spaces) safer, and I applaud those who are at least trying. And lately, there have been many groups that are trying. These are four examples, just from the past few weeks:

JAPAN:

In Japan, men groping women and girls on public transportation is a problem, but it’s challenging for them, especially girls, to speak out in the moment when it happens.

A female high school student in Tokyo who was regularly groped by men on her ride home from school (and reported it, but that did not stop it) and her mother designed a button that said “Groping is a crime” and “I won’t let the matter drop” which she attached to her school bag. The buttons seem to be a deterrent, and no man has groped her since she put them on her bag.

Her success inspired others. Recently, thanks to a fundraising campaign (“Stop Chikan Badge Project”), the Chikan Yokushi Katsudo Center expanded on her idea and mass produced buttons. The designs on the buttons were also selected through crowdsourcing – there were 441 submissions and five designs selected. Recently, volunteers from the organization distributed 500 of the buttons at the JR Shibuya Station, with plans to distribute them at other stations. Not only did girls and young women take badges, but adults took them too to distribute to their daughters.

MEXICO:

In early April, twenty women wearing dark clothing across their body and faces held a flash mob protest against sexual harassment on the transit system in Mexico City. They were organized by the group Information Group on Reproductive Choice after one of the women’s colleagues was attacked. A 2014 study found that more than 60 percent of women in Mexico City and faced sexual abuse while riding public transit.

The women demonstrated at various stations and on the subway itself. Both metro authority staff and passengers were respectful and many women passengers stopped to thank them for raising awareness through their demonstration.

UK:

Transport London conducted a survey in 2013 of their riders and found that around one in seven women had experienced unwanted sexual behavior on public transit. In response, they launched Project Guardian in conjunction with the British Transport, Metropolitan and City of London police forces and local advocacy groups, to raise awareness and train employees. But even still, few people reported harassment when they experienced it.

One year ago, they released the Report It to Stop It campaign. The video captures the way harassment can escalate and a voice asks at various points, “Would you report it?”

This month, one year later, Siwan Hayward, TfL’s deputy director of enforcement and on-street operations said there’s “not enough data yet to say it’s a trend” but “we are beginning to see what we hope is actually the prevalence of sexual offences falling.”

Notably, the video has been viewed nearly five million times and 36 percent more people are coming forward to report harassment, resulting in a 40 percent increase in arrests. As Ellie Violet Bramley wrote for the Guardian, “the real win is the cultural shift this signals – women won’t accept this behaviour as routine any more, and neither will the authorities.”

USA:

Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) has been working in collaboration with Collective Action for Safe Spaces and Stop Street Harassment on an anti-harassment campaign that has included station-wide awareness posters, an online reporting form, the training of employees, and outreach days at Metro stations. All of these efforts set the tone that sexual harassment is unacceptable and is taken seriously.

Over International Anti-Street Harassment Week, the three organizations released the results of the first-ever survey on the system. This is the biggest study of its kind for any transit system in the United States.

In the 1,000 person-regionally representative survey conducted in January 2016 by Shugoll Research, 21 percent of riders had experienced some form of sexual harassment, with verbal harassment being the most common form. Women were three times more likely than men to experience sexual harassment.

In positive news, 41 percent of the riders were familiar with the latest anti-harassment campaign and those who were familiar with it were twice as likely to report their experiences of harassment. Based on the findings, WMATA, CASS and SSH are currently working on a new awareness campaign that will be released in a few weeks.

Find ideas for how YOU can help make public spaces safer.

Perth Taxi Driver Charged with Sexual Assault

July 10, 2009 By HKearl

A few months ago I wrote about an alleged sexual aggression toward a female passenger by a taxi driver in Brisbane, Australia, which prompted authorities in the area to warn females not to take taxis alone late at night (how helpful – not).

Well, now I just read about a taxi driver in Perth, Western Australia, who allegedly sexually assaulted a passenger in February and is now being charged with that crime.

“”It will be alleged the 22-year-old female victim was being driven home in a taxi from Fremantle and the driver took her to an industrial area in Malaga and sexually assaulted her,” police spokesman Samuel Dinnison said.

Mr Dinnison said it was alleged the taxi driver then drove the woman to his house and left her there.

Sex assault squad officers located the taxi driver last night and charged him with two counts of sexual penetration without consent.

He will appear in the Midland Magistrates Court on Tuesday, July 14.”

How horrible for the young woman. I hope he is charged and that his sentence deterrs any other taxi drivers from engaging in assault… Horrible horrible.

Cab Driver Allegedly Assaults Passenger in L.A.

June 10, 2009 By HKearl

In Los Angeles, California, a cab driver has been arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a female passenger. Unlike the recent incident in Malaysia where it sounds like the cab driver was assaulting women in the cab, this cab driver followed the woman into her home and assaulted her there. After the woman called the police, the cab company fully cooperated with the police and the driver was arrested last week.

“The L.A. Department of Transportation is stressing that with 2,300 licensed cab drivers in the city of L.A., taking a cab is still a safe way to get around town.” – via ABC local news

I think this is better advice – free from fear-mongering – than the advice given to women in Australia after a cab driver became aggressive toward a female passenger: “The best thing to do is not to travel alone at night.” Some advice, huh? It’s not realistic for everyone to avoid being out alone at night and it places the responsibility for avoiding the problem with the women instead of the perpetrators.

The LAPD believes there could be other victims and urges anyone with information to call the LAPD at (877) 527-3247.