ctbg1

This is just something thats bugging me a lot and I want some opinions on it. On April 26th 2011 (I got this date from my ticket), I saw a guy reach over from behind and slowly attempt to grope a girl. It was dark, probably why he did it, so I couldn't see what was going on, but it went on for a few hours. He stopped and restarted again sometimes.

What was sad was that the girl woke up when he was reaching over during the middle of the night and he quickly threw himself back to his seat and pretended to be asleep. She peered over the gap, saw him asleep and went back to sleep I presume.

He did it again. She woke up again and he did the same thing. I felt so bad I didn't do anything to this day. 3 years have passed. I think the airline was Hainan Airlines, I tried to contact and report it to those Hainan people, but they just ignored the topic entirely.

What do you think of the situation?

NewbieRunner

Welcome to FT, ctbg1.

I'm moving this thread to the Women Travelers forum with the agreement of the forum moderators.

NewbieRunner
Co-mod, CommunityBuzz

travelmad478

I'm sorry you didn't do anything. My response would have been to immediately stop him, physically if possible, verbally if you weren't close enough to firmly grab his hand. The next step would be to call the flight attendant (although if this were Hainan Airlines, I'm not sure that would be particularly effective). I would have tried hard to avoid involving/waking the girl, because it would have mortified and upset her to realize that this was happening.

My goal would be to prosecute the guy, or at least make him realize that this behavior is completely unacceptable in society, while keeping the girl out of things (if they needed a witness, they had you). By doing nothing you just gave him license to do this whenever he feels like it, and that's wrong.

underpressure

Had I witnessed that, most likely he would have been carried off that aircraft on a stretcher or in a body bag. @:-)

It should have been immediately stopped and reported!

ctbg1

I think the guy was pretty young too. He had a bag that was branded from some local highschool. I got a good look at him after the flight landed. He looked young. He was probably 14 or 15. Maybe he made a mistake, but what I saw was just wrong.

SkiAdcock

It's unfortunate that you didn't do anything at the time, either asking him what he was doing or calling a FA. When you say you tried contacting the airline, was it immediately after the flight or 3 years later?

PS - Welcome to Flyertalk!

artemis021

What he did was wrong, and you should've said something at the time, but you need to forgive yourself for it. Stop beating yourself up over it. Next time-if there is a next time- you'll say something.

Kagehitokiri

unfortunately probably common outside US/CA/AU/NZ and EU.

are you prepared to respond to a threat of serious/great bodily harm? do not make assumptions about how someone will respond to a "physical" action, especially someone who has already committed (or attempted to commit) a public physical assault.

all i can do is hope i do not run into situations like this, especially in certain foreign areas. how i might react in a situation like this is dependent on the exact situation.

but yes, not in a situation like this, but in a worst case scenario, i believe i would be prepared to take extremely serious action, and be prepared for consequences.

sliiide

No, it's just not reported to you living there as much as instances of it from elsewhere are.

In 2012, the NY Times published the results of a govt. study that said that 1 in 5 women in the US say that they've been sexually assaulted at some time in their life. In the 2000 FBI Uniform Crime Report it was found that in the US a rape is reported about once every five minutes. In 2000, the American Medical Association estimated that only 10% of sexual assaults (including but not only rapes) are reported. A small percentage of all of these stats allude to males - probably 100,000 or so reported rapes each year; men are also normally less likely to report. I've done a lot of work in this area and by that these figures seem right. From my travels and time spent living in and finding out information in the other places you mentioned, it's pretty much the same.

Kagehitokiri

i was only talking about cultural and legal differences, nothing more. some legal systems involve stoning women (etc) for various alleged crimes. if you note what i quoted, it was about report being ignored by an asian company. i was absolutely not saying anything about crime rates anywhere. i also did not intend to imply that 100% of areas i mentioned (in statement you quoted) are equivalent. areas will vary.

poshgirl58

With hindsight, you should have reported it to the FA. However, how they reacted would have depended on their training and company policies. Whilst cultural differences are often used as an excuse for such behaviour and how it is dealt with, there is no excuse.

As part of an on-going project, I have asked frequent travellers to share any experiences on the subject. The larger carriers (Thai, BA, Virgin Atlantic) do not tolerate this behaviour and will deal with it appropriately. In some cases, police have met the flight on landing and taken the guilty person into custody.

Hopefully he will not try it again. Flying is stressful enough these days for crew and passengers alike, without having to deal with such unacceptable behaviour.

mds875

You probably should have done/said something, but we have all had one of these things where we should have done/said something but didn't - don't beat yourself up about it. Sometimes, we really just can't believe what we are seeing...

Not sure how much the girl's embarrassment factors here, the guy's embarrassment would have been complete I would hope, if nothing else. My sister was groped - fully awake - on a night train in France 10 feet away from me and I didn't know about it until after the fact. It is more common than we all think.

sliiide

What I said includes that too. It happens just as often in the places I quoted. Not just with companies but in first-hand cases with the police too. They'll ignore a situation that they are present at and keep going.


On the earlier point - something to keep in mind is that things that happen in one culture don't translate well in isolation. Stoning happens in some muslim countries, but those countries have also had female heads of state and women in cultural leadership positions more often than the quoted countries (which do vary between themselves as well as you said) where stoning isn't a part of society. Women are revered more historically and culturally. So, we just don't have enough of a clue as to how everything feels like in context unless we live there. The stoning bit is probably very bad, but the glass ceiling isn't as strong and I guess that life isn't as constrained in the ways that they are in western countries.


Anyway similar to what the last poster said, this groping situation happened to a friend on an overnight train in Italy years ago. Only overnighter i've ever taken, so I only have that sample size to go by.

missydarlin

If there was no report from the victim ... I can't imagine that an airline, Asian or not, is going to start an investigation from a report made by a 3rd party who admits that he/she couldn't actually see what was going on, and didn't bother to report it inflight.

Loren Pechtel

Given the description she obviously couldn't identify the perp and thus dropped it--in her eyes what good would it do to say she was molested by an unknown person?


In a case like this I think the best approach would be to gather evidence. Video if possible, pictures otherwise. Stealthily if possible (run the ISO way up if you have to), use flash if you have to. Once you have it on film then you show the FA.