Women-only carriages to cut sex attacks?

[Stu]

Today on the Birmingham Mail website:
http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/women-only-train-carriages-could-cut-7854436

1117 offences in a year sounds like (and indeed is) a large number, but must surely pale in significance to the number of train journeys taken by women that pass without incident. It would probably be more cost-effective to have more on-train security, than to provide extra carriages that only women can use.

Maybe more time should be spent on punishing the offenders, and educating people to respect others, rather than tarring all men as dirty sexual deviants.

[andy]

Today on the Birmingham Mail website:
http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/women-only-train-carriages-could-cut-7854436

1117 offences in a year sounds like (and indeed is) a large number, but must surely pale in significance to the number of train journeys taken by women that pass without incident. It would probably be more cost-effective to have more on-train security, than to provide extra carriages that only women can use.

Maybe more time should be spent on punishing the offenders, and educating people to respect others, rather than tarring all men as dirty sexual deviants.

A massive backward step that will never happen.

Police out and about is what fixes these issues. Has anyone noticed the increased police presence aound the transport networks at the moment? The irony is that this is due to a ramping up of the terror threat level, but the effect it has on antisocial behaviour and crime onboard public transport is extremely noticeable.

[the trainbasher]

This was actually discussed last year on another forum that I used to be on and the consensus was that it would be unworkable on many grounds

-  you have to ensure that there are enough available carriages for other passengers so that would automatically rule some services out along with trains that are DOO.

- it beaches several points of the Equality Act

- There's also been men who've been attacked by groups of drunks on trains. On the same basis you'd have to provide a sober males only carriage.

- a female only carriage may makes things worse on some services. The attackers know exactly where to go to target females and there isn't the chance of a decent amateur rugby player sitting behind them who can help the female out if she was being attacked

- on the last train on some lines on a Friday or Saturday night in December it can be pretty much full and standing on a several carriage train - I can see others than those wanting to assault going into (potentially) the only carriage with room in it even if it said "no males" on the door/window.

- Not to mention the fact that, as a male, I'd be pretty annoyed if my train was full and standing yet there were empty seats in a females-only coach.