Reading this book recommended by a friend who is a lot younger than me and is also a voracious reader. I love catching up with her to learn about what she's read lately and what she truly enjoyed. I cannot match the clip at which P reads - that was me more than thirty years ago, but it is great to live that life vicariously through her. This statistic caught my eye for a number of reasons :
A 2016 study found that 90% of French women had been victims of sexual harassment on public transport;55 in May that year two men were jailed for an attempted gang rape on a Paris train.
I have used public transportation in Paris only as a tourist and for the short duration of my stay. From my vantage point it did not seem particularly unsafe but I was in the hive of activity during daylight hours, not commuting like a local. It goes to show how far the gap can be between perception and reality. I do have a lot of commuter experience in India and the 90% number would be about right based on what I know. I had to wonder if a woman from France traveling in India by local bus or train would come away with the same false sense of safety as I did in Paris. Maybe the locals in India would be less likely to bother her and perhaps that was true about me in France because I was a tourist.
In 2017 a Danish woman tweeted about what happened when she reported a man who was sexually harassing her on a bus.65 After asking her what she expected him to do, the bus driver commented, ‘You’re a pretty girl, what do you expect?’ Her experience echoes that of a twenty-six-year-old woman riding a bus in Delhi: ‘It was around 9 p.m. A man standing behind touched me inappropriately. I shouted and caught the guy by his collar. I made the driver stop the bus too. But I was told to get off and solve it myself because other passengers were getting late.’
The level of apathy described by the woman in Delhi is one I am very familiar with but I wanted to believe that women have it better elsewhere. There is a part of of me that clings to that notion for the sake of J and other young women. There must be a safe haven for women somewhere in the world. Reading this book has been hard for me. I understand why P said it made her angry to the point she had to stop reading and could only return to it later.
The lack of data on that the book cites over and over is a double-edged sword in a tragic sense. Lack of data on the one hand makes the world appear less awful than it is for women. Imagine where every incident was recorded and data was freely available for all to see. It would paint an extremely bleak picture of the world that would make every woman and her family members fearful, perhaps to the point the freedoms women have only recently started to enjoy, would go away through self-policing of some sort by the women themselves or those who care about them. I am not sure that is the answer to the problem either.
Comments