Dolly's blog: Girl On The Train

When I was 15 I was sexually assaulted on the Paris Metro.  “That was terrible”, said the French family I was staying with as we got off the train.  Odd, I thought, that they’d clearly seen but hadn’t intervened.  But what did I know; I was 15 and this was France. 

Fast forward to my twenties.  Men on trains, nudging a bulge in their trousers, staring straight at me and daring a response.  I say nothing. 

Fast forward to my forties.  I’m on a train about to leave Waterloo, looking out the window.  He’s walking along the platform and I see him see me.  I recognise him because he’s sat opposite me before, his head resting on a rucksack he places on the table between us as he “sleeps”, one hand dangling below the table, his knee against mine no matter how much I contort myself. 

Maybe I’m imagining it, I’d told myself, knowing I wasn’t.  But this time I absolutely knew, because how many times can the same person do the same thing before it’s clearly deliberate.  He’d walked well beyond the door I was sat near and past lots of other empty seats, but here he was, again, edging into the seat opposite me, placing his bag on the table, putting his head on it, “sleeping” as we pulled out of Waterloo, his knee making contact each time I edged further away. 

One of the best things about getting older is that bit by bit, my willingness to tolerate bad behaviour has reduced.  Finding a voice I hadn’t known I had, and emboldened I think by having recently heard Laura Bates talk about her Everyday Sexism Project, in a packed and entirely silent carriage I called out exactly what he was doing, told him to stop, and to get the hell out before I found the guard.  Which he did.  At which point two women on the opposite side of the carriage said “well done” and that he’d also done it to them.  So why had we all been silent?   

Fast forward to post-Covid and I’m on an evening tube into London, lost in happy thoughts as Taylor Swift sings into my earbuds.  Until I notice a middle-aged woman much further down the carriage, trying to stop three young men from verbally harassing a young woman.  The young woman pretends to speak to someone on her phone, whilst the rest of the carriage stare into theirs.  Both women are isolated and clearly not ok.  So I walk down the carriage, past at least 30 people pretending they can’t hear, and support the women until the boys get off, dispensing further abuse as they go.  Above the heads of the silent are multiple posters saying that sexual harassment on trains is not tolerated, but no one does a bloody thing, apart from two middle aged women who are scared but have also had enough.  

Then there’s my teenage daughter.   Walking through a beautiful cathedral city in school uniform (a clue about their age right there) she and her friends are regularly harassed by men slowing down in their cars, shouting demeaning comments out of the window, or “just” leering.  I have no doubt there are other incidents she hasn’t told me about. 

Why am I talking about all this now?  Partly because of Saoirse Ronan’s intervention on Graham Norton when she pointed out that yes, actually, women think about how to protect themselves all of the time.  Every woman knows this; we just don’t talk about it much.  So let’s, because each time we do, someone else might feel braver and can hopefully help others. 

So much has changed since I was 15 and yet so much hasn’t.  Enough already.