There’s a grotesque train seat making its way around Mexico City right now. You might have seen it – a nude male figure moulded out of peach-coloured plastic. It’s not some strange art project but an initiative run by Mexico City’s Government to highlight sexual harassment of women on transport.
Stats from the capital indicate that a remarkable nine out of 10 women in the city have experienced some form of sexual harassment. The seat is designed to make people uncomfortable, ask questions and make close encounters with the male body a problem for everyone. It’s almost impossible to sit on the sculpted seat, especially for men. There’s a massive cock in the way of a comfy commute. A sign in front of the seat explains its point and the problem faced by women every day. It’s certainly a shock tactic but will it succeed where so many other cities have failed?
France’s Failure of Females
A 2015 study found that 100% of Parisian women had been victims of sexual harassment on public transport. No, that is not a typo, it’s a startling and scary statistic from the City of Love. The ultimate effect of that harassment was that women changed aspects of their lives from the clothes they wore to when and how they travelled in a bid to to deter physical and verbal attacks. It was, as usual, a female problem that they were left to fix on their own for far too long.
In light of these findings, France launched a national 12-step action plan. Those steps included poster campaigns, marches, introducing request stops on night buses, numbers for victims to call or text, more personnel at stations and stopping sexist messages from being spread. On top of this, there was still the punishment of five years in prison and a €75,000 fine for offenders.
It all sounds incredible but mere months after making the pledge, Paris’s public transport body was forced to apologise for running a sexist publicity campaign – not a great start to the anti-harassment crusade.
It’s a new story in 2017, or so we hope. Such sexism could be a thing of Parisian past as the Mayor has announced that the capital city would be banning derogatory and degrading adverts. The hope is that removing objectifying pictures will help change mindsets and reset the rules of what’s acceptable.
The initiative isn’t purely focused on women: ethnicity, nationality, religion, orientation, sex and age will all be taken into account by the managing body of Paris billboards. In her announcement, Mayor Anne Hidalgo cited London as a leader in the battle against sexual harassment on public transport.
Khan’s Crackdown
Headlines were made in 2016 when Protein World’s “Are you beach body ready” billboards were plastered across London Tube platforms. The enormous reaction to the weight loss supplement poster, featuring a thigh-gapped ribcage-showing busty blonde, set in motion a response from Sadiq Khan, who had been Mayor for just a month.
Khan proposed a London Underground ban on adverts promoting body-shaming. Since then TfL has set up a policing group with their advertising partners to keep an eye on all underground ads. That monitoring group includes JCDecaux, which will now police Paris’s posters.
Regardless of naysayers somehow linking Khan’s decision to Sharia law, it’s a great idea. Women don’t need to be told that London has its own harassment issues. A 2014 poll found a third of women had been verbally harassed on public transport, with a fifth having been physically attacked.
Capital cities taking a stand against objectification is a vital step. Too many campaigns blame victims, like the 2015 Sussex Police safety campaign. Their ill-judged poster read “Which one of your mates is most vulnerable on a night out? The one you leave behind.” Once again, the ball was put in our court: don’t blame your rapist, blame the friends who left you behind.
Guardians of the Phallucy
A further TfL survey found that 90% of those who experienced harassment didn’t report it. Those findings launched London’s Project Guardian, a year-long program investigating and implementing preventative measures against sexual harassment. The project was deemed a success, helping to bring hundreds of suspects to justice and rejuvenating the Met’s ideas for tackling the problem.
Unfortunately the project found that the most effective way to reduce the problem and reassure women was to increase the presence of police. The problem is that the Met is being forced to make massive budget cuts. Officers are going to be increasingly thin on the ground and victims will once again be left to fend for themselves.
If our Government refuses to protect its public then Project Guardian will have been for naught. No doubt they’ll look for a cheaper alternative so perhaps Mexico City’s sexual harassment seat will soon be pulling into a Tube station near you.
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