Subway groping arrests on the rise

Posted by Deanna Zandt at 8:44 AM on June 27, 2006.

The New York Times is reporting that the NYPD announced an increase in the numbers of arrests for subway groping and flashing -- 13 in total for the last week. As the Times points out, whenever a story like this gets published, the women who ride public transportation daily (especially subways) all over the world nod in unison, remember their own experiences.

The Times asks the question:

What is the right way to react to a humiliating, but not life-threatening, situation? Should you announce to an entire car of strangers that you have just been violated?

Most of the time, the women said, they seethe inwardly but say nothing.

What is the right answer, here? A friend of mine once stood up after a man groped her breast three times on the subway, and announced to everyone on the car that he'd done it. For the next few stops, she warned every woman who tried to sit in her former seat that the man was a groper and dangerous, until the man finally got up and left the train. But not every situation calls for that approach, especially if you're alone on the train or in an otherwise more precarious position.

The Times also covers some of the prevention methods that women entail, and points to this story of the old internalized "If I'd just done XYZ, he wouldn't have done that to me" broken record that we all seem to have running in our heads:

Jenna Caccaro, 22, a fashion student who lives in Brooklyn, said she was first flashed on the subway when she was 15. She thought it might have been because she was wearing her Catholic school uniform. “I thought that maybe I’d done something to attract him,” she said, “but my family reassured me he was just a sleaze.”

Jill at Feministe responds:

And this is the problem with encouraging these sorts of defense mechanisms in women. Obviously everyone needs to do what they need to do to survive and get through their day, and we should all try and take necessary safety precautions. But suggesting that if only women would dress a certain way / wouldn’t go to certain places / wouldn’t engage in certain activities, sexual assault wouldn’t occur is victim-blaming at its worst, and only succeeds in making individual women feel guilty for events which they had no part in causing.

This is a big pet peeve of mine, too, because it doesn't address the culture that creates and allows the assault to happen. This can't be simply a case of "boys will be boys," can it? It seems that men should get pretty upset when that's used as a defense of egregious, offensive sexual behavior since it tends to reduce them to drooling machines with no self-control or even self-determination. And that certainly doesn't sound like the guys I know at all. Do men defend their sexuality as more diverse than this?

On an uplifting note, a group of (mostly) women have taken the cue of a New Yorker who took a picture of a flasher on the subway with her cameraphone, and the flasher was subsequently arrested and convicted. They've created a website where people can report harassment publicly with their cameras and turn the tables on the harassers -- it's called Holla Back New York City.

Deanna Zandt is a contributing editor at AlterNet.