Invisible Women

by Caroline Criado Perez

  Women may also in any case require more trips to the bathroom than men: pregnancy significantly reduces bladder capacity, and women are eight times more likely to suffer from urinary-tract infections than men which again increases the frequency with which a toilet visit is needed.5 In the face of all these anatomical differences, it would surely take a formal (rather than substantive) equality dogmatist to continue to argue that equal floor space between men and women is fair.

  It gets a lot worse than supposedly equal provision being in fact male-biased. A third of the world’s population lack adequate toilet provision at all.6 According to the UN, one in three women lack access to safe toilets,7 and WaterAid reports that girls and women collectively spend 97 billion hours a year finding a safe place to relieve themselves.8 The lack of adequate toilet provision is a public health problem for both sexes (for example, in India, where 60% of the population does not have access to a toilet,9 90% of surface water is contaminated10), but the problem is particularly acute for women, in no small part because of the attitude that men can ‘go anywhere’,11 while for women to be seen urinating is shameful. Women get up before dawn and then wait for hours until dusk to go out again in search of a relatively private place to urinate or defecate.12 And this isn’t just a problem in poor countries: Human Rights Watch spoke to young girls working in tobacco fields in America and found that they would ‘refrain from relieving themselves at all during the day – aided by avoiding drinking liquids, which increased their risk of dehydration and heat illness’.13

  This affects women’s paid labour: women make up 91% of the 86% of Indians who work in the informal economy. Many of these women work as market vendors, and no public toilets means they have nowhere to go during the workday.14 In Afghanistan, female police officers go to the toilets in pairs, because their changing and toilet facilities (described by an international advisor to Human Rights Watch as ‘a site of harassment’) often have peepholes or doors which don’t lock. The lack of safe toilet provision in fact often prevents women from joining the force at all, and this in turn has had a significant impact on how the police respond to crimes against women and girls.15

  Despite women’s arguably greater need for public sanitary facilities, however, men are often the ones who are better provided for. More than half of Mumbai’s 5 million women do not have an indoor toilet and there are no free public toilets for women. Meanwhile, free urinals for men run into the thousands.16 A typical Mumbai slum might have six bathrooms for 8,000 women,17 and government figures from 2014 revealed that the city as a whole has ‘3,536 public restrooms that women share with men, but not a single women’s-only facility – not even in some police stations and courts’.18

  A 2015 survey found that 12.5% of women in Mumbai’s slums defecate in the open at night: they ‘prefer to take this risk to walking 58 metres, the average distance of the community toilet from their homes’.19 But defecating in the open isn’t really much safer for women: there is a real danger of sexual assault from men who lurk near and on the routes to areas which are known to be used by women when they need to relieve themselves.20 The level of violation ranges from voyeurism (including being masturbated at) to rape – and in extreme cases, to murder.

  Accurate data on the level of sexual harassment and assault faced by women as they seek to engage in what should be a mundane activity is hard to come by, in no small degree because of the shame surrounding the issue. Few women are willing to talk about something they may well be blamed for ‘encouraging’.21 But what data does exist makes it clear that a failure to provide adequate sanitation is a feminist issue.

  A 2016 study found that Indian women who use fields to relieve themselves are twice as likely to face non-partner sexual violence as women with a household toilet.22 Following the 2014 murder of two girls aged twelve and fourteen in Uttar Pradesh,23 there was a brief flurry of national focus on the lack of adequate toilet provision for women, and in December 2014, Bombay’s high court ordered all municipal corporations to provide safe and clean toilets for women near main roads.24 Ninety-six potential sites were identified and Bombay’s local government promised 50 million rupees (around £550,000) to build new toilets. But a year later, reported online women’s rights magazine Broadly, not a single brick had been laid.25 The fund allocation lapsed in 2016.26

  Local governments that fail to provide public toilets may believe that they are cutting costs, but a 2015 Yale study suggests that this is a false economy. The study authors developed a mathematical model linking the ‘risk of sexual assault to the number of sanitation facilities and the time a woman must spend walking to a toilet’, and calculated the tangible costs (lost earnings, medical, court and prison expenses) and intangible costs (pain and suffering, risk of homicide) of sexual assault versus the cost of installing and maintaining toilets.

  They applied their model to Khayelitsha, a township in South Africa, which has an estimated 5,600 toilets for a population of 2.4 million, resulting, the authors claimed, in 635 sexual assaults at a cost of $40 million each year. Increasing the number of toilets to 11,300, at a direct cost of $12 million, would almost half the average distance to a toilet and result in a 30% decrease in sexual assault. According to the mathematical model, the reduced social and policing costs more than offset the additional cost of providing toilets, leaving the township $5 million better off. These figures, they added, were conservative, since their costings had not included ‘the many additional health benefits of improving sanitation in resource-constrained urban areas’.27

  And there are many additional health benefits, particularly for women. Women get bladder and urinary-tract infections from holding in their urine; others suffer from dehydration or chronic constipation.28 Women who defecate outdoors are at risk of a range of infections and diseases, including pelvic inflammatory disease, worm infections, hepatitis, diarrhoea, cholera, polio and waterborne diseases. Some of these diseases kill millions of people (particularly women and children) every year in India alone.29

  Health problems arising from a lack of public sanitary provision are not restricted to low-income countries. Canadian and British studies have revealed that referrals for urinary-tract infections, problems with distended bladders, and a range of other uro-gynaecological problems have increased proportionately to toilet closure; similarly, research shows that the chances of streptococcal toxic shock syndrome from sanitary protection are increased ‘if there are no toilets available to change tampons during menstruation’.30 And, increasingly, there isn’t a toilet available. A 2007 study revealed that public-toilet closure in the US has been a trend for over half a century.31 In the UK, 50% of public toilets were closed between 1995 and 2013 – or, as in the public toilet closest to where I live in London, converted into the proverbial hipster bar.32

  Urban planning that fails to account for women’s risk of being sexually assaulted is a clear violation of women’s equal right to public spaces – and inadequate sanitary provision is only one of the many ways planners exclude women with this kind of gender-insensitive design.

  Women are often scared in public spaces. In fact, they are around twice as likely to be scared as men. And, rather unusually, we have the data to prove it. ‘Crime surveys and empirical studies from different parts of the world show that a majority of women are fearful of the potential violence against them when in public spaces,’ explains urban-planning professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris. Analyses of crime data from the US and Sweden both show that women and men respond to similar environmental conditions differently, with women tending to be ‘more sensitive than men to signs of danger and social disorder, graffiti, and unkempt and abandoned buildings’.

  A UK Department for Transport study highlighted the stark difference between male and female perceptions of danger, finding that 62% of women are scared walking in multistorey car parks, 60% are scared waiting on train platforms, 49% are scared waiting at the bus stop, and 59% are scared walking home from a bus stop or station. The figures for m
en are 31%, 25%, 20% and 25%, respectively.33 Fear of crime is particularly high among low-income women, partly because they tend to live in areas with higher crime rates, but also because they are likely to be working odd hours34 and often come home from work in the dark.35 Ethnic-minority women tend to experience more fear for the same reasons, as well as having the added danger of (often gendered) racialised violence to contend with.

  This fear impacts on women’s mobility and their basic right of access to the city.36 Studies from Finland, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Taiwan and the UK all show that women adjust their behaviour and their travel patterns to accommodate this fear.37 They avoid specific routes, times and modes of transport. They avoid travelling at night. In one Canadian study exactly half of the women surveyed ‘indicated that fear prevents them from using public transportation or parking garages’38 and studies from around the world find that fear of crime is ‘amongst the most important reasons women choose not to use public transport’.39 If they can afford to, they choose to drive or take a taxi instead.

  The trouble is, many of them can’t afford to. Most passengers are ‘transit captives’, meaning that they have no reasonable means other than public transport to get from one place to another.40 This lack of choice particularly affects low-income women, and those living in the global south – in India, for example, women have limited access41 to private transport and therefore rely on public transport to a far greater extent than men.42 These women adopt strategies such as taking a longer roundabout route or only travelling while accompanied. Some women go as far as quitting their jobs – a solution that is not limited to those on low incomes.43 When I tweeted about women’s experiences of harassment on public transport, one man replied to tell me about ‘a very intelligent and capable woman’ he knows, who ‘gave up a really good job in the City and moved out of London because she hated being groped on the Tube’.

  Clearly, there is an injustice here. But all too often the blame is put on women themselves for feeling fearful, rather than on planners for designing urban spaces and transit environments that make them feel unsafe. And, as usual, the gender data gap is behind it all. The official statistics show that men are in fact more likely to be victims of crime in public spaces, including public transport. And this paradox, says Loukaitou-Sideris, ‘has led to the conclusion that women’s fear of crime is irrational and more of a problem than crime itself’. But, she points out, the official statistics do not tell the whole story.

  As women navigate public spaces, they are also navigating a slew of threatening sexual behaviours. Before we even get to the more serious offences like being assaulted, women are dealing on a daily basis with behaviours from men that make – and are often calculated to make – them feel uncomfortable. Ranging from catcalling, to being leered at, to the use of ‘sexualised slurs [and] requests for someone’s name’, none of these behaviours is criminal exactly, but they all add up to a feeling of sexual menace.44 A feeling of being watched. Of being in danger – and in fact these behaviours can easily escalate. Enough women have experienced the sharp shift from ‘Smile, love, it might never happen,’ to ‘Fuck you bitch why are you ignoring me?’ to being followed home and assaulted, to know that an ‘innocent’ comment from a male stranger can be anything but.

  But women don’t report these behaviours, because who could they report them to? Until the emergence of groups like ‘EverydaySexism’ and ‘Hollaback’, which give women a space in which they can talk about the intimidating-but-just-short-of-criminal behaviours they face in public spaces on a daily basis, public awareness of this behaviour was more or less non-existent. When police in Nottingham started recording misogynistic behaviour (everything from indecent exposure, to groping, to upskirting) as a hate crime (or if the behaviour was not strictly criminal, a hate incident), they found reports shot up – not because men had suddenly got much worse, but because women felt that they would be taken seriously.45

  The invisibility of the threatening behaviour women face in public is compounded by the reality that men don’t do this to women who are accompanied by other men – who are in any case also much less likely to experience this kind of behaviour. A recent Brazilian survey found that two-thirds of women had been victims of sexual harassment and violence while in transit, half of them on public transportation. The proportion among men was 18%.46 So men who didn’t do it and didn’t experience it simply didn’t know it was going on. And they all too often dismissed women who told them about it with an airy ‘Well I’ve never seen it.’ Another gender data gap.

  And one that is exacerbated by how we collect the data. ‘Large-scale data for the prevalence of sexual harassment is lacking’, explains a 2017 paper, not only because of under-reporting, but also because it is ‘often not included in crime statistics’.47 Added to this is the problem that sexual harassment ‘is often poorly classified’, with many studies failing to either ‘define harassment or codify harassment types’. In 2014, the Australia Institute found that 87% of the women surveyed had experienced verbal or physical street harassment, but data ‘concerning the extent or form of incidences were not collected’.

  The apparent mismatch between women’s fear and the level of violence the official statistics say they experience is not just about the general stew of menace women are navigating. Women also aren’t reporting the more serious offences. A 2016 survey of sexual harassment in the Washington DC metro found that 77% of those who were harassed never reported, which is around the same level found by Inmujeres, a Mexican government agency that campaigns on violence against women.48

  The reporting rate is even lower in New York City, with an estimated 96% of sexual harassment and 86% of sexual assaults in the subway system going unreported, while in London, where a fifth of women have reportedly been physically assaulted while using public transport, a 2017 study found that ‘around 90% of people who experience unwanted sexual behaviour would not report it’.49 An NGO survey of female metro users in Baku, Azerbaijan found that none of the women who said they had been sexually harassed reported it to the appropriate authority.50

  Clearly then, official police data is not showing the full picture. But although there is a lack of global data on ‘the exact nature, location and time’ of sexual crimes against women in public spaces, a growing body of research shows that women are in fact not being irrational.51

  From Rio to Los Angeles men have raped women and girls on buses while drivers carry blithely along their routes.52 ‘The truth is that every time I leave my house, I am scared,’ said Victoria Juárez, a thirty-four-year old woman from Mexico where nine in ten women have experienced sexual harassment while using public transport,53 and female workers report that men hang around in cars ‘to kidnap women getting on and off buses’.54 Travelling to and from work is, they say, the most dangerous part of their day.

  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.56 A 2016 Washington metro survey found that women were three times more likely than men to face harassment on public transport.57 In April that year58 a suspect was identified in an indecent exposure incident on the Washington metro; a month later he had escalated to raping a woman at knifepoint on a train.59 In October 2017 another repeat offender was arrested on the Washington metro: he had targeted the same victim twice.60

  ‘The message is unanimous across all articles of this special issue’, wrote professor of urban planning Vania Ceccato in her afterword to a 2017 special issue of the academic journal Crime Prevention and Community Safety, ‘Women’s Victimisation and Safety in Transit Environments’: ‘sexual crime against women in transit (cases of staring, touching, groping, ejaculation, exposing genitalia and full rape) is a highly under-reported offence’.61

  Women don’t report for a variety of reasons. Some of these are societal: stigma, shame, concern that they’ll be blamed or disbelieved. And there is little t
hat authorities can do about this. That change has to come from society itself. But many women don’t report for more prosaic issues that can be far more easily addressed.

  For a start, women often aren’t sure exactly ‘what counts as sexual harassment and are afraid of the response of authorities’.62 Assuming they do realise that what has happened is wrong, they often don’t know who it is they have to report to.63 Around the world there is a lack of clear information for women on what to do if they are sexually harassed or assaulted on public transport (although most authorities seem to have managed to install clear signage about what to do in the event of spotting a suspicious package). Sometimes, though, the lack of signage is because there really aren’t any procedures in place.64 And this leads to the next problem: the experiences of those women who do report.

  In 2017 a British 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.’66

  Fear of being dismissed was why Sarah Hayward, a former local councillor for my borough in London, didn’t report. ‘I was felt up on a packed Tube train when I was about twenty-two. I can’t begin to explain the absolute terror of that feeling. And I just knew that if I said anything, people would think it was just that the Tube was packed.’ The irony is, the Tube having been packed may well have been a factor in what happened to her: the data we have suggests that peak travel times coincide with peak sexual harassment times.67 Hayward tells me that she still tries ‘to avoid the Tube in rush hour’.