Women tell of harassment on the tube as calls grow for segregated carriages
A petition urging Transport for London to introduce women-only carriages on the underground has gained more than 13,000 signatures
Muslim women and girls have spoken out about sexual harassment on the tube as a petition urging the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, to introduce women-only carriages gains momentum.
The petition has attracted more than 13,000 signatures since its launch on 30 September. It is the work of Camile Brown, a 21-year-old University College London student, and follows a report by British Transport Police (BTP) that found that more than a third of women in the UK had experienced harassment on public transport.
Transport for London (TfL) said it did not support Brown’s proposal — but women who spoke to Hyphen say something has to change.
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“I still remember a man masturbating while staring at my reflection in the carriage window,” said Marwa*, a 19-year-old Muslim woman who works in London as a retail assistant. “I was so scared and felt physically sick to my stomach.
“Everyone settled deeper into their newspapers, and no one said or did anything.”
Marwa was in her school uniform and felt vulnerable. She said this had been just one of several incidents of sexual harassment she had experienced, as had other girls from her south London school.
“I didn’t report these incidents as I was too upset and just wanted to forget that they even happened,” she said.
Last year, the BBC reported that there had been more than 2,400 sexual offences on its network between February 2023 and January 2024, representing a 10.5% year on year rise.
But incidents such as Marwa’s go unreported, meaning the true number is likely to be higher.
Maya Rose Williams, a 20-year-old English student, told Hyphen how she had been making her way to university earlier this year with her friend when a man began harassing them at Waterloo station.
“He followed and preyed on us all the way to our gates, lunging into our faces repeatedly shouting ‘boo’. We were both terrified,” she said. “When we confronted him about it, he began to get aggressive, shouting at us that we don’t belong here, that we were disgusting and to go back to Afghanistan. Ironically, I’m a British revert.”
Both students were wearing a black niqab and jilbab, and Williams said they strongly felt that the man’s actions were motivated by both Islamophobia and the fact they are women.
“These people wouldn’t do this to a man,” she said. “They want to prey on vulnerable women who can’t defend themselves properly. No one even helped, they simply watched.”
She reported the incident to the BTP at the end of September. To her knowledge, the perpetrator hasn’t been found.
“There should be more security around the gates and platforms. Having female-only tube carriages would help make everyone comfortable, not just for Muslims,” says Williams. “It’s nicer to have segregation where we can be together in unity.”
Yasmine Allaf, 34, lives in north London and has friends and family who have faced harassment by men on public transport. She believes segregating tube carriages must come alongside other measures to keep women safer.
“We should be holding men accountable,” she said. “We need harsher penalties, stronger deterrents and higher prosecution rates. That, in conjunction with a female-only carriage, will help make us women feel a lot safer on public transport.”
She also warned: “If most stations can’t provide lift access for wheelchair users or disabled people, what makes you think they’ll make changes for women?”
A spokesperson for Khan said: “The safety of women and girls in London is an absolute priority for the mayor. While Sadiq is clear that the national epidemic of violence against women and girls must be treated with the utmost urgency, both by police and society as a whole, isolating women is not the way to tackle offenders.”
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For Marwa, who experienced travel on women-only carriages while visiting Dubai, such a change in London would be positive — but she warns that such measures would need to be inclusive of trans women.
The idea of female-only tube carriages has been proposed before. In 2015, then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn proposed introducing single-gender carriages after 10pm, alongside a 24-hour hotline to report crimes.
TfL’s director of security, policing and enforcement, Siwan Hayward, said: “Everyone should feel and be safe when travelling across the network, but isolating women is not the answer to tackling sexual offences. We do not support any proposal for female-only train carriages on TfL services, but instead are working closely with the police to ensure our capital’s transport network is a hostile place for offenders.”
* Name has been changed
