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Sexual violence restricts women’s mobility and use of public space, infringing on their right to the city (Condon et al 2007, Smith 2008, Sweet and Ortiz 2015, Valentine 1989). The majority of victims of sexual assault are women, although gay men and gender non-conforming people are also at elevated risk (Stringer 2007, Clark et al 2016, Madan and Nalla 2016, Ceccato and Paz 2017). Even among women who have not been personally assaulted, a culturally-instilled awareness of vulnerability, often reinforced by street harassment and other forms of sexual aggression, exert a ‘tax’ on women’s use of public space (Condon et al 2007, Valentine 1992). The resulting fear shapes women’s travel, inspiring many to avoid certain types of space, times of day, or modes of transportation (Loukaitou-Sideris 2014, Pain 1997, Condon et al 2007). In particular, women are deterred from using public transit, both by the transit service itself and the need to walk in and wait in sometimes-isolated environments in order to access the service. When women venture out in spite of fear, they commonly take “everyday precautions” such as traveling in groups, choosing well-lit walking routes, and in some cases, choosing clothing they believe will attract less attention (Condon et al 2007, de Jubainville and Vanier 2017).

Men are also affected by insecure streets and transit systems, but the effects tend to be much less pronounced (Spears et al 2013). For example, while both male and female crime victims often report increased fear after the experience, men’s fear tends to center on specific geographic points; women’s fear generalizes to a much broader portion of public space (Spicer and Song 2017).

Although fear of crime is most often associated with the risk of rape in isolated

environments and late at night, the largest number of sexual assaults occur in crowded conditions during the day (Ball and Wesson 2017, Ceccato and Paz 2017). This can include venues such as

concerts, markets, and public festivals, but public transit is a dominant setting (Clark et al 2016). The most common crowding-facilitated assaults are groping and frotteurism (sexual rubbing). By normalizing physical contact that would normally be unacceptable, crowds provide

perpetrators with access, camouflage, and plausible deniability (Ceccato and Paz 2017). As we shall see, many planners react to the ambiguity of physical contact in crowds by doubting the trustworthiness of victim reports. Further, transit users tend to perceive an assault as less severe if it occurs in a crowded area as opposed to an isolated one, and are less likely to report that they would intervene (Ball and Wesson 2017).

The reality that most transit sexual assaults occur in crowded conditions is at odds with the fact that most research and policy focuses on assuaging women’s fear of solitary

environments (e.g. Loukaitou-Sideris 2014, Valentine 1992, Smith 2008). The common presumption that actual crime is rare has lead researchers to lose sight of a very real epidemic: sexual assault on transit is common in cities around the world. In a number of cities, at least half of female transit users have been assaulted; when sexual harassment is included, this figure sometimes approaches 100% (Horii and Burgess 2012, Dunckel-Graglia 2013, Tripathi et al 2017). Even in relatively safe cities such as New York (Thomson Reuters 2015), about 15% of female subway users have been sexually assaulted, a figure that appears to be growing as the system confronts increasing crowding (Stringer 2007). Victims rarely report assaults to police, in part because the experience is often made unpleasant by dismissive attitudes and insensitive questioning implying that the victim is at fault (Ibid., Tripathi et al 2017, Natarajan et al 2017). The systemic factors that discourage reporting reinforce the invisibility of the problem (Ceccato and Paz 2017).

harassment. This has been attributed to planners’ tendency to minimize the consequences of ‘minor’ crimes (Loukaitou-Sideris et al 2009, Clark et al 2016, Ball and Wesson 2017).

Additionally, the failure to apply a gendered lens to planning issues tends to result in a failure to address women’s needs (Fainstein and Servon 2005). In Loukaitou-Sideris et al.’s (2009) survey of medium and large transit agencies, they found while two-thirds of transit planners believed women had specific security needs, only one-third believed planners should implement programs targeted towards those needs. The percentage of agencies that acted on this belief was even lower: out of the 131 systems surveyed, only three had women’s safety programs. Although some cities, such as São Paulo, Mexico City, Tokyo, and Quito have been more proactive in addressing the problem (Ceccato and Paz 2017, Dunckel-Graglia 2013, Horii and Burgess 2012, Carvajal 2017), women’s needs for safe transit remain, by and large, inadequately addressed (Loukaitou-Sideris and Fink 2009).

Sexual assault in general is underreported and under-prosecuted. In the US, only 31% of rapes are reported to the police, as opposed to 62% of robberies (RAINN 201520_{). Rape} reports are also less likely to result in an arrest, and less likely to be referred to a prosecutor. The cumulative result of these discrepancies at every stage of the process is that a robber is three times as likely to face jail time as a rapist; less than 1% of rapes result in jail time for the perpetrator.

For transit sexual assault, the reporting rate is even lower, partially because it is dominated by acts that are not considered “serious,” particularly by men (Clark et al 2016, Dunckel-Graglia 2013). To take an extreme example, every single one of the 200 female

students surveyed by Tripathi et al (2016) in Uttar Pradesh, India had been a victim or witness of sexual harassment or assault on public transit in a six month period of 2015, with 25% of

respondents experiencing at least ten incidents per month. According to police records for the province of 200 million people, no incidents of harassment or assault on transit were reported in all of 2014-2015. While the situation in New York City is not quite so extreme, only 14% of subway sexual assault victims reported contacting the police or transit agency (Stringer 2007), less than half the national reporting rate for rape (RAINN 2015).

The low reporting rate is a serious obstacle to prosecution. To the extent that policymakers incorrectly view crime statistics as an accurate representation of the extent of assault, underreporting also decreases the likelihood that policymakers will prioritize addressing the problem. Potential predators are empowered by the knowledge that, given this pervasive, systemic sexism, they are unlikely to face negative consequences for mistreating or assaulting women.

In this paper, I focus on planners’ Visions of sexual assault specifically on transit. However, since transit sexual assault is one manifestation of a systemic threat to women’s safety in public and private spaces, it is worth considering gendered experiences and attitudes more broadly. For example, for women, sexual assault represents the escalation of a more quotidian experience of harassment (Clark et al 2016, Condon et al 2007, Valentine 1992). Cisgender men, in contrast, are not conditioned through acculturation and daily experience to perceive themselves as vulnerable to sexual aggression. While cisgender men sometimes experience sexual assault, the incident is not reinforced by lifelong experience with harassment and gendered norms of vulnerability. As a result, they may find a women’s fear difficult to

about sexual harassment and assault, whether on the street or in the workplace. On sexual harassment in academia, Jahren (2016) remarked wryly, “my male colleagues will sputter with gall, appalled by the actions of bad apples so rare they have been encountered by every single woman I know.” This skepticism extends into the criminal justice system; the tendency of police, judges, and juries to put victims of sexual violence, rather than their attackers, on trial is well- documented (Richardson and May 1999, Jordan 2008).