Summary
Berlin lawmaker Antje Kapek of the Green Party proposed introducing women-only carriages on the city’s underground trains to enhance safety, inspired by a similar approach in Tokyo.
Kapek cited rising nighttime attacks on women and crowded evening conditions as reasons for the measure, which is still a proposal without legislative backing.
Her suggestion follows a recent rape case on the Berlin metro. The city’s BVG transport authority expressed doubts, arguing current safety measures, including 250 security staff and emergency contact points, are sufficient.
Or…hear me out here…maybe we could try holding men accountable for their actions? I’m just spit-balling here, but it’s so crazy it just might work.
This implies all men are capable of considering the long term impact of their decisions… holding them accountable should be done. But it won’t have much of a prevention effect because the perpetrators aren’t forward thinking types.
True. I must have typed my comment during my daily 5 seconds of optimism before crashing back down to my usual cynical reality.
Civilization has advanced, but humans fell behind. I wish I knew how to fix it… for my daughters sake. But I do not.
I honestly think it’s ridiculous our public transportation is so unsafe to warrant this, but if it’s necessary, then so be it. But if we’re going to make women only carriages we should make an equal number of men only carriages, because not all women will use the women only carriages and i don’t want my available commute space compromised because authorities can’t keep public spaces safe for women.
I know it sounds a “but what about men” comment, but let me explain why. At my gymn, we used to have an open space for everyone. Then they decided to segregate about 1/3 of the space and make it ladies only while the remaining space was to be for everyone. The result is that, despite having machines available in the women’s area, women want to be in the everyone’s area all the time while the women’s area is usually empty. The result is that there’s no space for everyone to train in and men just have to queue to be able to train at peak times, usually in the late afternoon. We all pay the same, we all need our exercise, why are men having less ? Because we share the same gender with rapists ? How is that my fault ?
I can see the exact same thing happening with transportation. You limit men’s available commute space on account of having an unsafe space for women, then the women’s carriage goes empty while the everyone carriage forces everyone to be up against everyone. This is unacceptable. I have been sexually harassed as a man in public transportation too and while i recognize it’s not as bad for me as it is for women, because it only happened a few times, it always happened by forcing me to be smushed against a ton of people.
I would prefer if everyone respected everyone and we could live like civilized people together in an equal and safe society, where nobody was threatened, harassed or raped, but if we’re going to start sex segregation at least do it in such a manner so that everyone has equal amounts of space and opportunity to carry out their lives without being inconvenienced. If we segregate spaces, make x space for women, x space for men and x for everyone together. None of this special places just for women while everyone pays the same crap. That way if the common area is too full, i can just move to the men only area and that’s it. If we can’t be decent, at least let’s try to be fair.
I have been sexually harassed as a man in public transportation too and while i recognize it’s not as bad for me as it is for women, because it only happened a few times, it always happened by forcing me to be smushed against a ton of people.
Let me just say: I am sorry you went through that. This is awful and indeed unacceptable. Thank you for pointing out that assault is not an entirely gendered issue, and that segregation sends everyone down a slippery slope where we fail to stop it in the first place.
Oh yeah, many times. I’ve had a guy run his hands through my hair and push a boner against me. I’ve had a teenage girl lick my bicep and giggle at me with her friends. I’ve had an older woman just grab my butt and pretend she didn’t do it. There was another guy who was just petting my shoulders and leg, discreetly through the crowd.
It’s just those things like what are you gonna do as a guy ? Report it ? Hey mr officer, a teenage girl licked my arm and then her friends giggled at me, if you run you can still arrest them ? I’d just be laughed at. No point reporting it i guess. It’s just gross and annoying. I always chalked it up as problems of living in a big city.
I’ve never been at risk of being raped though. I am pretty muscular. I can see how it would be scary to be and much, much worse.
Rio have this, only works on Rush hours and the women only trains are just as full as the other ones.
They have trains like this and work fine on Rio de Janeiro. They’re only women only in rush hour.
We need this in America, I promise you more people will use the trains
Instead of fighting rapists, let’s segregate women and men
Yeah. The Japanese women only carriages are 100% necessary and also extremely shameful.
It’s a real shame we can’t do multiple things at the same time. /s
Molest and ride the train?
Does it have to be molest? Can’t it just be publicly masturbate like on New York City subways?
Ah, so you see a lot of efforts to fight rapists? I don’t, on the contrary most celebrities are now linked to some form of sexual assault and everyone defends them.
Also, if we were to do both, please explain to me how showing gender as such a major thing that you need to discriminate based on it, would make anything better in a world where rapists would actually be fought against,
Its not about fighting rapists, It’s about letting women have an environment where they can feel safe.
Another safe environment is one where the woman reflexively punches the assailant’s gob, and the other men around look at him in a “what did you think would happen?” kind of way, backing her up, because self-defence is understood to be completely legitimate and justified.
Y’all need more shield maidens wherever it is that you’re from.
And why do they not feel safe? Because rapists.
This has “cover them up from head to toe so nobody gets any rapey thoughts” extremist Islam energy. That’s not solving the problem. The rapists will still be there when they disembark the train.
No need to reach as far as islam, with every rape story you have a crowd of shits that rush screaming “she wouldn’t have been raped if she wore proper clothes” and the like. The simple facts that rape victims feel ashamed to even talk about it shows that there is a big problem of defending rapists rather than victims, and the victims are instead shown as the cause of the assault.
You don’t have to be a rapist to make someone feel unsafe. Creeps and people who just keep hitting on women when they clearly don’t want them to exist as well.
I never understand why someone would feel offended by something like this. I doubt many people are riding public transit to make new friends. Most seem to want to be ignored there.
I’m of bear-like physique and I assume to a lone woman on a train car that has no clue who I am, potentially intimidating. Likely, I’d expect neither of us would pay each other much mind. If she decided to get up and move to an empty car, it probably still wouldn’t dawn on me right away why she moved, as I’m minding my own business. If I did realize, why should I be offended though? If anything, it’s a good strategic move on her part. She’s not there to get to know me, and she’s darned well not there to potentially get to know me in a negative way, no matter how slim the chance of that could be.
Should they require separate cars? Of course not. But I don’t see how it could be seen as ant-man. If your first thought is to be seriously angry at someone for not trusting a stranger, to me, that pretty much proves them right.
I’m mostly just sad when that happens. People do tend to consider me intimidating, but only very rarely scary, just as a roller-coaster might be intimidating but it’s not going to jump at you and strap you in so there’s no reason to fear it. On the contrary, I do tend to make people feel safe. Which then leads me to believe that those few people who actually are scared by my presence have completely fucked threat radars.
Then, OTOH, if you’re suppressing any urges to jump at people and strapping them in and looping them around yep people are going to notice that. You might not actually be doing it, ever, but the possibility is there and you’re going to be perceived differently, suppressed aggression is still visible in body language and at least their subconscious is going to pick up on it. People are going to be scared, at least a bit on edge, even if their threat radars aren’t fucked.
If your first thought is to be seriously angry at someone for not trusting a stranger, to me, that pretty much proves them right.
Nah they’re angry at themselves for not being at peace with themselves and projecting outwards, just as pretty much everyone else. SNAFU.
It is unfortunate. I try and be mindful around new people to look visibly happy, or at least not in a bad mood. But I can’t fault anyone for playing it safe. Especially since being harassed isn’t something you can undo or something anyone should have to build a tolerance for. They may have also been in a previous incident that we don’t know about.
If they’re overreacting or not isn’t really a strangers’ business. We start to venture into egocentrism to think their behaviors have anything to do with us. It’s just a live and let live thing. There’s plenty of people over been nice to, and they still never liked me for one reason or another, but it’s no biggie.
If it was a repeated thing, like they saw you every day and actively avoided you, that’s a somewhat different story, but some person we only see once, it’s not worth the mental energy to worry about it to me.
One of the many reasons Tokyo does have those train carriages is because women are systematically discouraged from speaking up about being assaulted, even as it is happening. Even in a public place surrounded by other people. The offense was and, to an extent, still is often treated as a nuisance rather than a violent sexual crime. Empowering women who speak up about being assaulted and prosecuting sexual assault offenses is how you reduce assault rates. Make it easier for victims to speak up, and show that what happened to them will be taken seriously.
Creating women’s only carriages isn’t a solution but an affirmation that men are on some inherent level sexually abusive (therefore decreasing the seriousness with which assault is treated, and decreasing the likelihood women who speak up will receive support as “that’s just how men are”). It also, you know, only does something about one very specific kind of sexual assault. It does nothing to address sexual harassment and assault committed in any other public or private space.
I can understand feeling safety in environments free from men when men are essentially given free reign to do whatever they want to with minute amounts of offenders ever facing any kind of punishment. I also feel that simply creating women only cars doesn’t go far enough and actually in some ways enables alternative lines of justification for sexual assault if a woman isn’t in a women’s car. People can and will ask why she didn’t take the women’s car, as though it is the personal initiative of women to prevent themselves from being assaulted.
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So in the future rhey can add “but in which wagon was she traveling?” to the “what was she wearing” nonsense
Maybe teach your men to respect women’s boundaries? Always treating the symptoms and not the root cause. Works the other way too.
#AllMen but #NotAllWomen but #Equality, right?
That works great for regular guys. Not so great for the evil psychopaths who just don’t care what we try to teach them and will always be looking for people to victimize.
Those will always be a small part. If it’s culturally clear what is harrassment and shouldn’t be tolerated, it’s far more likely that 1) there are actual consequences to sexual harrassment because victims feel comfortable speaking up and 2) that bystanders will try to intervene. Both of which make it less likely for anyone to even try.
When speaking up is met with “you dressed wrong”, “he was just trying to get to know you”, that is the core problem. Adding “you were on the wrong train car” isn’t necessarily helpful.
Japans women-only cars are sadly necessary, but the focus should be on making them unnecessary, not adding gender segregation in more places.
The issue with psychopaths is that although they may be rare, they can have an outsized impact. It only takes one of them to victimize hundreds of people and create an atmosphere of terror.
What keeps the evil psychopath from just entering the womens carriage?
Unless there is a conductor at every station to enforce it, this is just the same nonsense with claiming that excluding transgender people from bathrooms to somehow repel assailants.
Norms. Same thing for women’s bathrooms. Unless you are alone in there, the psychopath is going to face multiple women yelling at him to leave.
As a society of laws we like to think we can solve everything by just writing a good law. Sometimes it’s much better to create situations where strong norms can solve the problem without the need for law enforcement. Norms are like laws where everyone is an enforcer.
This is brilliant! We should also teach people to not steal or murder too! OMG I think you’ve cracked it!
Do you have a book or newsletter I could subscribe to?
I feel like this just leads to “trans-vestigations” people would accuse you of being a man, even if you are a cisgender woman, if you act slightly “odd” to them.
