Every day after work, Kate Kyriacou boards an Adelaide train to get home. Last week, something happened to her that shocked her to the core. She was sexually assaulted, along with another two women, on a peak hour train ride home and not one person intervened to help.
“I was on my way home from work,” Kyriacou, chief of staff at Adelaide’s Sunday Mail told Neos Kosmos. “I sat down on the train and a man got on opposite me and stretched out his legs so they were either side of my legs and pinned my legs where I was sitting to make it hard for me to get up and walk away,” she said. She said the perpetrator then began to lean forward and touch her legs and also tried looking up her skirt.
“Just as I was about to say something he got up and walked away and somebody else sat in that seat. When he came back, he sat down across the aisle to me where two other ladies were sitting, and he did the same thing to the lady that he did to me with his legs and she got off the train not long after that. “He turned to the girl next to him and moved over so she was squashed between her and the window and he started touching her legs trying to make it look accidental when it was obvious what he was doing. Then he leaned over and asked her for the time and when she checked her watch he started touching her chest,” she said.
Kyriacou decided enough was enough and spoke up about it. “I told him to leave her alone and to stop touching her as she was looking very uncomfortable and very upset. I worded it so people would understand that he was being inappropriate.” After she spoke up to the man, he began abusing her, swearing at her and threatening to beat her up and whilst this was going on, the rest of the train went about their business. Not one person helped her.
“I should have called the police after he had walked away. I think at the time it’s hard to know how to react. I think I thought if I called the police he would have got off at the next stop and it would have been wasting their time but as they’ve said to me since I should have just called.”
Sophie Diamandi, lecturer at University of South Australia in sociology, told Neos Kosmos “there’s a lot of apathy in society, particularly in a confined space like on a train”. “I think people are fearful of their own safety. That doesn’t actually condone not speaking up and trying to stop it but I think people are generally fearful of intervening due to concerns about their own safety,” Diamandi said.
“Often in these situations it is about (the perpetrator) exerting power over other individuals. And we know sexual assault is about power and not about sex. “Unfortunately people that experience that sort of assault start questioning ‘is it the way they dress, is it the way they look, is it something that they did,’ so often they get into self blame which they shouldn’t of course as it has nothing to do with the way they dressed, said or behaved to bring on that sexual assualt.”
A spokesperson from the Department of Transport, Energy and Infrastructure (DTEI) said “enhancing safety for passengers is a priority for the (South Australian) Government as (they) increase (their) efforts to encourage greater use of our public transport system”. DTEI works closely with the South Australian police to ensure passenger safety through a range of ongoing inititiatives that include: plain clothed and uniformed transit police circulating the rail network; the roll out of CCTV cameras at stations, interchanges and on trains and trams; increased lighting at stations; security guards; and a $37 million program to refurbish our 3000/3100 series railcars includes security enhancements to existing CCTV, more cameras and a live CCTV feed to the driver’s compartment. These railcars also have a emergency call button enabling passengers to communicate with the driver to ensure the police are notified, if required, immediately.
With a background in crime writing, Kyriacou is often vigilant in public places. Although she doesn’t feel scared on public transport, she did find the whole incident confronting when it happened. “The thing that upset me more than anything is understanding that people don’t want to get involved,” said Kyriacou. “I certainly don’t want anyone to get hurt on my behalf, but when I spoke up if someone else had said to leave her alone, all of the sudden it’s two voices against this man and he would have backed down a lot more.”
Diamandi agrees. “Try and be a united force to confront the perpertrator, because once people do speak up it can be quite empowering so long as they’re not putting themselves or others at greater risk. Unfortunately you don’t know if the person has a weapon in those situations,” she said. But Diamandi does believe that a lot of this has to do with education.
“I think every member in society needs to take responsibility for acknowledging and educating our children, women and men so that people understand why it happens and how it happens and what they can do to try and protect themselves as much as possible from it occuring. “I do believe an extensive community education program across all sectors of the community is really important because we know that issues like interpersonal violence, family violence and domestic violence occurs across all cultures and classes and age groups.
“It’s important that we educate our children to help them understand how they might protect themselves from being at risk. Or how we might educate adolescents or even adult women who might find thesmelves in a domestic violence situation.
“We have been able to put this out in the agenda now and really try to addresss some of those issues and get a deeper understanding around the dynamic on why these assaults occur. We need to understand it has always been prevelant in our society and we need to start acknowledging that it is a real community issue and a real social problem in our society.”