Almost 10,000 people have signed a petition calling for women-only carriages to be introduced on the London Underground.
UCL student Camille Brown set up the petition urging London mayor Sadiq Khan and Transport for London (TfL) to introduce the carriages as a way to protect women.
The 21-year-old is calling for at least one women-only carriage on all tube lines.
At the time of writing, the petition has just over 9,500 signatures. When petitions reach 10,000 signatures, they get a response from the government.
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In the petition, Brown said she has “had enough of women being unsafe” on the tube.
She wrote: “Public harassment of women on the London Underground is a growing issue, and TFL’s approach is failing – we always see it, we do say it, but it’s still not sorted.”
The student recalled how when she was younger and went to school in London she would have to send a “daily ‘SAS’ message” to her family’s group chat to let them know she was ‘safely at school.’
Brown said when she was 13 though, she was harassed by a man who wanted her to “spend the day with him.”
She wrote: “I was utterly terrified and the thought that kept coming into my mind was ‘but I’m in school uniform?’ Unfortunately, even that is not armour enough to protect against intimidation, harassment or even assault.
“It was not a rare occurrence for girls at my school to arrive in tears from having experienced or witnessed something traumatising on the underground.”
Brown pointed to how women-only carriages have been introduced in cities such as Tokyo, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro.
Last year, the BBC reported that sexual offences have risen year on year by more than 10% on tubes, trains and buses in London.
A 2023 survey from the British Transport Police found that over a third of women have been victims of sexual harassment or sexual offences while commuting by train or tube.
On top of these worrying stats, a survey from Girlguiding this year found that more than half (56%) of girls and women aged 11-21 don’t feel safe on public transport on their own.
However, TfL have said in a response to Brown’s petition that they have no plans to introduce women-only carriages.
Siwan Hayward, TfL’s Director of Security, Policing and Enforcement, told the Mirror: “Everyone should feel and be safe when travelling across the network, but isolating women is not the answer to tackling sexual offenses.
“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, including the use of intelligence-led policing operations to target offenders and hotspot locations.
“Women and girls should feel able to come forward and report any incident, confident that they will be taken seriously and that action will be taken. That’s why we have been working with the British Transport Police over many years to raise awareness of this issue, to help customers feel more empowered to report this behaviour. While we anticipated and welcome increased reporting, any incidence of sexual harassment is utterly unacceptable and we are working hard to stamp it out on our network.
“We encourage anyone who experiences or witnesses this behaviour to report it to the police or a member of staff, so that we can take action against offenders and ensure preventative measures are in place.”