I came across this last night:

“4 out of 10 Singapore Management University (SMU) students in our survey [of 135 women] have been sexually harassed while taking either a bus or a train. Sexual harassment is something that happens everyday on public transport, and it’s wrong. Yet, people don’t talk about it. This is something that needs to change.

So a team of us at SMU have set out to bring about this change by organizing an open forum, emPOWER!HOUSE, to discuss issues relating to sexual harassment on public transport.”

The forum took place in March, 2009, and was sponsored by AWARE; I couldn’t find information about how it went (have you?).

In the comments of the post, there is an interesting discussion about the sample size, what is sexual harassment, how accurate the survey information is, etc.

And regardless of what how many respondents said they were sexually harassed, the young woman who helped conduct the survey said she and many of her friends have been sexually harassed on public transportation and, when I hope a societal goal is to have 0 people getting harassed, that shows there is a problem. And with the number of countries that have had to engage in anti-sexual harassment subway campaigns or created women–only cars to handle the harassment, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t a real problem in  Singapore too. In fact, just two weeks ago women-only cars were suggested in Beijing in part becasue of sexual harassment.