Sexual Harassment and Assault in Transit Environments: A Review of the English-language Literature

Abstract

<jats:p> The #MeToo movement has brought much attention to crimes of sexual harassment in the workplace, but less attention has been given to such crimes taking place in transit environments. Reviewing international literature on sexual harassment, assault, and rape in transit environments, this article explores questions that relate to the nature, frequency, and impact of these crimes, and the strategies and interventions adopted by and recommended to public agencies to improve actual and perceived safety for riders. Highlighting an issue that primarily affects women, the article helps advocate for a better inclusion of women’s needs in planning for safety and mobility. </jats:p>

Conceptualizing Mobility Inequality: Mobility and Accessibility for the Marginalized

“…Women in rural South Africa are more domestically bounded than those in urban areas (Venter, Vokolkova, and Michalek 2007), and women in a culture with strong gender role differentiation such as Pakistan and India experience less freedom for independent travel (Adeel, Yeh, and Zhang 2017;Alberts, Pfeffer, and Baud 2016;Cook and Butz 2017). Women also experience heightened safety concerns while traveling, resulting in their avoidance of certain times, routes, or modes (Ding, Loukaitou-Sideris, and Agrawal 2020;Graglia 2016;Stark and Meschik 2018). It is argued that this fear is formed by sociocultural constructs of gender socialization and victimization, exacerbated by gender-insensitive design of public spaces and transit environments (Law 1999;Loukaitou-Sideris 2016;Ding, Loukaitou-Sideris, and Agrawal 2020).…”

“…In terms of urban form, a street layout prioritizing car traffic and a coarse urban grain (Crane 2000;Kandt 2018) marginalizes captive pedestrians, who tend to be low-income individuals without access to cars or transit. Most transport and land-use systems do not accommodate women's travel patterns and their safety concerns (Ding, Loukaitou-Sideris, and Agrawal 2020;Hanson 2010;Law 1999;Loukaitou-Sideris 2016) or those with specific mobility needs (Golledge 1993;Imrie and Kumar 1998;Imrie 2000). Similar effects of spatial segregation and social exclusion adversely affect immigrants and minorities (Preston and McLafferty 2016;Sheller 2015;Uteng 2009;Yu 2016).…”

“…Reviewing a wide array of research articles, we provide a fundamental understanding of the factors and approaches to mobility inequality across scales, geographical contexts, and sociocultural contexts. Highlighting mobility and accessibility for the marginalized, we connect discussions on a macroscale (e.g., distribution of transport benefits and costs; Karner et al 2020) to a microscale (e.g., women's safety in public transit environments ;Ding, Loukaitou-Sideris, and Agrawal 2020). The article concludes with two thought experiments to actualize the dilemmas and challenges for addressing mobility inequalities in planning practice and provide future research directions.…”

Sexual Harassment in Transit Environments among College Students in the #MeToo Era: Reporting Evidence from Six Continents

“…This literature is not comparative; empirical studies survey or interview riders in one city and in one transit system (bus or train). From this literature, we know that sexual violence behaviors are quite common in transit settings, however, victimization rates vary from one study to the other (Ding, Loukaitou-Sideris, & Agrawal, 2020). All studies find that female transit riders are disproportionately victimized compared to male riders.…”

“…For one, we were able to study a phenomenon with the evidence of largescale, comparative data. With the exception of a couple of studies by NGOs that have tried to examine sexual violence against women in transit in more than one city or country (Allen, Cardenas, Pereyra, & Sagaris, 2018), and literature reviews that synthesize the findings of different studies (Gekoski et al, 2015;Ding et al, 2020), scholarly empirical comparative work on the topic is missing.…”