Sexual harassment is a sad reality for millions of women across the world, but some French activists have found a brilliant way of encouraging men to respect women’s personal space.
Last week, results of a poll of 6,300 women, from 15 of the world’s biggest capitals came in. And they weren’t pretty. The YouGov and Thomson Reuters poll found a third of women in London said they’d been verbally abused on the capital’s travel network. This left 45% of London women polled saying that they would like women-only tube carriages.
However, Laura Bates of Everyday Sexism said this was a bit of a crap idea, as it instills us with the perception that men aren’t to be trusted, full stop: ‘It seems to accept that the problem is acceptable - that men will to harass women and that all we can do is contain them.’
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So if gender separation isn’t the answer, what is?
Well in Paris, where 85% of women polled said they had little confidence that bystanders to an incident of sexual assault would actually help them out, well, some activists seem to have a solution. Dare, a group of activists, have created advice stickers and on Halloween they went out on one of Paris’s metro lines in a bid to plaster it with the advice.
It’s so accurate it looks like it could be official advice, and it’s pretty funny, too.
One poster advises ‘Warning! Do not put your hand on my ass, or you could get slapped very hard!’ in French, English, German and Spanish. Another advises men to, even if the carriage is crowded: ‘not take advantage of it to rub yourself against your neighbour.’
Another, again in multilingual format, encourages people to speak out about harassment: ‘In case of sexual harassing or sexual touches: shout, ask, help, strike’.
And another warning outlines the French law against sexual assault and that flouting it could lead to 5 years imprisonment and a fine of up to €75,000 (£58,777).
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The fourth one isn’t directly related to sexual assault, but is surely an issue where men think that they’re so entitled to space that women’s personal boundaries can be impinged on. It reads: ‘Spreading your legs is not necessary. It is preferable to keep your legs together. Testicles are not made of crystal and will not explode.’
Anne-Cécile Mailfert, a spokeswoman for Dare said that the Takebackthemetro campaign was launched as a result of women having to change their behaviour to accommodate the fear of how men might behave towards them: ‘According to a survey we conducted , three quarters of them adapt their behavior , develop strategies , choose exactly where they sit.’
Dare’s mission, reports Le Monde, is to get a reaction from the RAPT (Paris’s transport system’s powers-that-be). As Anne- Cécile put it, the authority will advise Metro users ‘to prevent the risk of pickpocketing and to discourage littering’ but ‘This is a specific violence. At the moment, men do not adapt their strategy when going on the subway.’
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We’re not exactly blessed with the ability to predict the future; if we were, we could have avoided a few men being creepy on the tube to us. But we’ve got a suspicion that if the small minority of blokes who end up making women feel like crap, or bystanders to dodgy situations, took notice of these signs, and realised the consequences of what they’re doing, public transport might be a less scary place.
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A New Survey Says Young Women Experience The Most Intense Forms Of Online Sexual Harassment
'My Rapist Added Me On Facebook.' The Truth About Sexual Assault At Oxford University
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.