Posts about Sexual Harassment

Instead, CASS co-founder Chai Shenoy and board members Ben Merrion and I listened to, and were pleasantly surprised by, what they had to say.

In the 2 weeks since the hearing, WMATA had formed an internal task force consisting of about 10 people, including communications director Lynn Bowersox, spokesperson Dan Stessel, government relations director Regina Sullivan, and police chief Michael Taborn. They invited us to join the task force as well.

We were pleased to hear they wanted to implement all of our recommendations. They were eager for more feedback from us. They also were sincere, polite, and appreciative for bringing this issue to their attention and offering suggestions.

Our first recommendation was for WMATA to do a better job tracking sexual harassment incidents and to allow people to report verbal sexual harassment. In response, they launched both a new email address (harassment@wmata.com) and an online portal where people can easily report incidents. You can also continue to call Metro Transit Police at 202-962-2121.

For the first time, they are including verbal harassment on the list of crimes people can report, and they are encouraging people to submit photos of their harassers if they can take one safely. They will create quarterly reports detailing incidents. Once WMATA has a better sense of the amount, type, and locations of incidents, they will be better able to perform targeted prevention.

Our second recommendation was a public service announcement campaign to inform people how and what they can report. To implement this recommendation, WMATA turned to their transit counterparts in Boston, a city which has a successful anti-sexual harassment PSA campaign.

We learned that Boston is willing to let DC adapt their campaign as soon as they want. WMATA provided us with copies of the campaign, and over this past weekend we went through the different PSA options and offered feedback. WMATA hopes to roll out the campaign as early as the first week of April, in the spirit of Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

Our third recommendation was better training for employees so that when people report incidents, employees respond appropriately. WMATA officials plan to draft training materials soon and will let CASS review it to provide feedback. And, on Friday, CEO Richard Sarles wrote in his regular newsletter to the 11,000 employees at WMATA about the seriousness of sexual harassment and assault on the Metro.

We know government agencies, including WMATA, are notoriously slow at changing and responding to complaints, and it is both surprising and commendable to see them move so quickly on implementing changes. We also know they took action so fast thanks to the outpouring of stories and supportive comments from people who emailed, tweeted, blogged, and wrote comments on articles, including the article here about the Metro oversight hearing.

I want to thank everyone who spoke out about this on and off-line. You helped make this happen.

WMATA wants more feedback and constructive suggestions about what else they can do. Several WMATA staff members will join CASS's "The REAL Metro Forum" event on Thursday, March 22, 5:30 pm at AAUW, 1111 16th Street NW. Members of the public are welcome to attend this free event, which is one of 8 events occurring in DC (PDF) for International Anti-Street Harassment Week.

So please come, voice your opinion, and be part of the exciting and fast-moving efforts to end sexual harassment on the Metro system.

Six of us testified and we were the only members of the public who testified about anything relating to WMATA, so we had their attention and the attention of the media. After laying out the facts, sharing stories of harassment, and informing them about what transit systems in Boston, New York City and Chicago are doing to address sexual harassment that WMATA is not, we gave our recommendations.

1. Better tracking and reporting of incidents
   
2. A public service awareness campaign so people know what their rights are and how to report incidents
   
3. Better training of Metro employees so they don't harass passengers and so they respond to reports of harassment more appropriately.

Councilmember Bowser was very receptive to these suggestions, especially the PSA campaign. WMATA CEO Richard Sarles said he would talk with his counterparts in the three cities that have PSA campaigns, to get advice on how to bring one to DC. Their responses were very encouraging, but of course we won't call it a success until we actually have a campaign.

Anti-harassment PSA in Chicago.

And there is still work to do around WMATA's responses to and treatment of harassment.

While WMATA keeps painting harassment as flirting in their statements to the press, we're not talking about flirting, and the testimonies illustrated what's really going on. Here are two examples.

Ami Lynch testified about a Metro bus driver who harassed her. After small talk about how tall she was, he launched into inappropriate territory by saying, "Hey baby, it doesn't matter that I'm not tall, because when we're lying down it's all the same anyway," and as he laughed he gestured from his crotch to her crotch. She said she was stunned, stepped off the bus, crossed the street, and began to cry. After she reported it, the Customer Relations Manager told her how the bus driver would never have said that and didn't have time to talk to customers on his route. The case was closed.

She said she no longer takes that bus and it has cost her nearly $1,000 in cab fares to commute to her weekly appointment for which she previously used the 10B bus.

Pascale Leone shared how the following happened to her when she left a Metro station: "In a flash, the young male in the white T-shirt came onto me saying derogatory things about my body and proceeded to—in what felt like the longest seconds of my life—fondle my chest and buttocks unremittingly and then walked away as if nothing had happened. My shock wore off and anger quickly set in. I was pissed. I turned around with clenched fists and caught my assailants vacant eyes as he muttered, "You f---ing b-tch" and calmly turned around and continued to walk away."

When she reported him to a nearby Metro employee, he said, "Oh him. He just grabbed that girl's butt" pointing at a woman going up the escalators. Then he laughed. She said the next day she read in the DCist and the Examiner that minutes before her assault, he had punched a woman in the back of her head and after he groped her, he grabbed a woman on K Street and tried to rape her until a group of passerby's heard her scream and held the suspect until the police arrived..

Metro says they are doing a good job addressing sexual crimes since there were only 84 reported "sexual offenses" last year. We disagree. We know that sexual crimes are vastly under-reported to begin with and then, when people do try to report it, how many of them are like Ami and Pascale? Instead of having their incident handled and recorded, they're met with laughter or disbelief and their incident is left off the record.

Additionally, after our testimonies, we were told by someone in from the transit police office, that unless verbal harassment is directly threatening, it is not recorded at all and is a matter of free speech. So none of the verbal sexual harassment that we know is so prevalent is tracked.

It's funny how unwanted sexual comments constitute sexual harassment in the workplace and schools, but, according to the police officer, they are free speech on the Metro system.

Clearly, our work is just beginning. We plan to bring a larger group to testify at the WMATA budget hearing in April and we likely will launch a petition or advocacy campaign in March, so stay tuned.