My Body, His Decision

Friday evening, early September. It’s just after seven o’clock and I’m on my way home on the first of two short bus journeys. I’m tired and looking forward to an evening doing very little. The clocks are still on summer time and the sun has only just started to descend in the sky.

At the stop after mine, three men board the bus. They are laughing and joking amongst themselves, loudly. One of them has no hair and is so red in the face the colour has spread over his entire head. He looks as if he had been lightly simmered. They’ve clearly been drinking. They stand directly in front of my seat and so, as the bus moves along the road, I watch them, wondering if they are at the beginning of a big night.

The bus reaches my stop. I move to get up. There’s a man in front of me and a woman behind me but we can’t move, one of the three raucous men is blocking the way and only moves when his friend alerts him to those of us waiting. He steps to one side and stands by the exit.

The man in front of me passes him and exits. I follow. As I pass the man by the door, I feel something grab at my hip. It is only once I am on the pavement that I realise it was hands.

Before this moment, this tiny stitch in the fabric of time, I had heard several friends tell stories of harassment on public transport; from creepy passing comments to masturbation, the stories came in all shapes and sizes. I took public transport well aware that these things happened and that they could, in theory, happen to me. While I never actively made any plans of what I would do were I to find myself groped, grabbed, poked or harassed in any other sexual manner, there was, I realise now, a conviction that I would do something, anything, other than stand by, were the situation to arise.

Instead, I find myself standing there, unsure what to do. I’m angry. I’m really angry. I turn to the woman who disembarked behind me and I ask, loudly because the doors to the bus are still open, ‘Did he touch you too?’

She has a look of disgust on her face. ‘Yes’ she says.

I’m livid. I want something to happen, I want to challenge him, I want the bus driver to do something, I want somebody to do something. But everybody just watches.

After a beat, I say loudly, turning back to look at him, ‘That is NOT Okay.’

But once the words leave me, they stop fuming and become limp and pathetic instead. I feel powerless.

The door closes but the bus doesn’t move, waiting for the traffic lights.

I shoot the man standing by the exit, the man who touched me, an angry stare, trying to reclaim some dignity. I have a face, I have a name, I’m not just a body. I go to the front of the bus, hoping the bus driver will do something. But he doesn’t and the man who grabbed at me is left undisturbed. Instead, he sticks his tongue out and the bus pulls away.

Uncertain what to do, I make my way to my second bus stop around the corner. As I wait, I call two friends, one after the other. Neither picks up but after a text saying I need to talk, I speak to both within the hour.

I tell them I’m angry. I swear more than I usually do and that’s saying something. I tell them this isn’t right. They agree. There are tears in my eyes that fall creep out onto my cheeks but they can’t see them.

It was a minimal movement but I’m shaken by how I feel after.

I get home and call my mother. I rage to her about it. ‘How awful’ she says. ‘I know how you feel’ she says. She tells me a story about herself aged fourteen at the cinema. How a stranger sat in the seat next to hers and put his hand on her knee. How as the minutes passed and she sat there, unsure what to do, he moved his hand further and further up her thigh. When he got halfway, she stood up suddenly and ran out of the cinema.

I start to cry. It has been a long week. It has been a long day. It has been a long hour. I am tired, tired and angry. I cry because a man thought it was alright to touch me, however briefly, without my consent. I cry because a man thought it was alright to touch my mother, without hers. I cry because she wasn’t even an adult when it happened and her age made her vulnerable. I cry because I am an adult and it happened and my age didn’t protect me. I cry because as women we are vulnerable and we shouldn’t be.

It has been seven months since this happened. On the advice of my friends and my mother, I informed the police. They were very supportive. Concerns I had that the incident was too minimal for them to trouble with were unfounded. They told me all incidents of sexual harassment and, what they officially called this, sexual touching, were worth investigating. It could, they told me, be the start of behaviour far worse by this individual. These patterns of behaviour are important to monitor, they said.

Part of me tried to reason with myself before filing a complaint. There was, after all, minimal contact between myself and this individual. It was a tiny moment in time. I didn’t want to waste police time. And I didn’t want to be over-dramatic. But I’m glad I did. The Transport Police didn’t find anything and I don’t think they will. But they listened, they cared, they told me it mattered. They validated my feelings and agreed this man needed to know what he did was wrong.

In the meantime, I’ve been left somewhat skittish on public transport, especially in the months that followed. Luckily, a few months after the incident, I stopped needing to take that particular bus regularly at the time. But I still find myself more cautious on public transport, more suspicious of the men around me in case any turn out to have wandering hands also.

While this event was but a few seconds, it reminded me of how vulnerable women can be in public. This is, in large, something men take for granted, not appreciating the planning that goes in to a journey into the public sphere when you are a woman.

Driving with another woman at ten o’clock one night, we passed a man going for a run. We both agreed we could never see ourselves doing that and were shocked that he felt so free to do so. Secretly, I felt envy. When winter sets in, I have to plan my runs around the shortening daylight hours and resent the early evenings. It’s frustrating.

What can we do to improve this? It goes back to the idea of consent. We teach children to kiss and hug adults, even when they don’t want to. We teach young girls not to ruffle feathers, not preparing them for the moments when they need to stand up for themselves. I remember as a teenager being groped a disco and thinking this was alright as it was in a setting deemed socially acceptable for such advances. When trading stories from the disco with friends, I said some boy had pinched my bum to which a friend replied, ‘yeah but that’s nothing, everybody got pinched.’ But it wasn’t nothing and the gesture was not acceptable. Only now as an adult can I see that. Perhaps if I’d known back then that grabbing a girl’s bottom isn’t an acceptable way to show attraction, that it demonstrates a possessive intent instead of appreciation, I would have been angry. Perhaps if I’d felt confident enough to stand up to a boy, I’d have said something. And perhaps in doing so I would have had the courage to say something more last September.

Perhaps not. Hindsight is always a benefit and we can’t change what has happened, only hope to be better prepared for the future.

This week, I saw an article about a woman who experienced sexual harassment of a more persistent and disturbing degree on a bus journey. She tweeted her experience, including what the passenger who harassed her said and did and what the bus driver said and didn’t do. She said she’d spoken to the Transport Police and they were helpful. It’s comforting to know they continue to treat all incidents seriously and kindly. In the meantime, I wish all readers, male, female, non-binary, young and old, safe travels.