‘I felt panicked’: Police target sexual harassment and assault on trains
Rail passengers are being encouraged to report sexual offences through a new public awareness campaign launched today.
British Transport Police (BTP) says public information and reports are vital to helping catch and convict offenders.
A victim, speaking for the first time, explained how an offender sat next to them on a busy train and pretended to fall asleep in order to assault them.
Jen, 22, who chose not to reveal her surname, told Sky News the assault on her lasted around 15 minutes.
“I felt really panicked. I really didn’t know what to do.”
“Within a couple of minutes his hand was sort of resting on my knee,” she added. “Just lightly stroking it.”
Jen was on a train from Cambridge to London. She filmed part of the assault and shared it with her friends in a group chat.
“As time went on, it progressed further up my thigh. I was getting increasingly more uncomfortable but it was only when it got to the top of my thigh and in between my legs that I thought I have to do something.
“I was still messaging my girls chat and they were obviously like, ‘Oh confront him, slap his hand away’. But I was like, I’m not gonna do that. This man is like six foot tall.”
Passengers in Paddington station in London. Pic: PA
Instead, Jen sent a message to BTP and moved carriages. She says she received a response straight away so enlisted help from other passengers to get a description of the offender.
Officers met her at King’s Cross station where Jen helped point him out before police arrested him. The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years in prison.
Data released at the end of last year revealed over a third of women have been victims of sexual harassment or sexual offences while commuting by train or Underground.
The survey, conducted by BTP, also showed that 51% of those who have been victims of sexual offending say that other passengers tried to help them, yet only one in five people who have witnessed sexual harassment have reported it to police.
Read more:
Shoplifting ‘epidemic’ hits record high
Police officer who had sex with ‘drunk’ woman guilty of misconduct
Should courts sit 24/7 for protest hearings?
Click to subscribe to the Sky News Daily wherever you get your podcasts
BTP says its Your Piece of the Puzzle campaign will help offenders get caught and convicted.
Temporary assistant chief constable Paul Furnell said: “Every piece of information we receive, whether it’s from a victim themselves or from a bystander can play a part in a wider investigation against an individual.
“They may have made a sexual remark to you on the train, but the day before they could have sexually assaulted someone else.
“Your information may be the missing piece which leads us to identify the offender and secure justice for all their victims.”
He added: “We know these crimes often go under-reported for various reasons. Victims tell us they doubt themselves, or that they feel that what happened to them was minor and reporting wouldn’t be worthwhile.
“With this campaign, we want to highlight that this couldn’t be further from the truth.
“We have dedicated task forces and specialist teams to detect and investigate and we leave no stone unturned in bringing offenders to justice, but we need the public to make sure they are reporting all instances to us so that we can identify offenders fast and get them off our network.”
The UK-US trade deal has been signed and is “done”, US President Donald Trump has said as he met Sir Keir Starmer at the G7 summit.
The US president told reporters in Canada: “We signed it, and it’s done. It’s a fair deal for both. It’ll produce a lot of jobs, a lot of income.”
Sir Keir said the document “implements” the deal to cut tariffs on cars and aerospace, describing it as a “really important agreement”.
“So this is a very good day for both of our countries – a real sign of strength,” the prime minister added.
Mr Trump added that the UK was “very well protected” against any future tariffs, saying: “You know why? Because I like them”.
However, he did not say whether levies on British steel exports to the US would be set to 0%, saying “we’re gonna let you have that information in a little while”.
Mr Trump also praised Sir Keir as a “great” prime minister, adding: “We’ve been talking about this deal for six years, and he’s done what they haven’t been able to do.”
He added: “We’re very longtime partners and allies and friends and we’ve become friends in a short period of time.
“He’s slightly more liberal than me to put it mildly… but we get along.”
Sir Keir added that “we make it work”.
As the pair exited a mountain lodge in the Canadian Rockies where the summit is being held, Mr Trump held up a physical copy of the trade agreement to show reporters.
Several leaves of paper fell from the binding, and Sir Keir quickly stooped to pick them up, saying: “A very important document.”
Sir Keir Starmer picks up paper from the UK-US trade deal after Donald Trump dropped it at the G7 summit. Pic: Reuters
The US president also appeared to mistakenly refer to a “trade agreement with the European Union” at one point as he stood alongside the British prime minister.
Mr Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on countries in April. At the time, he announced 10% “reciprocal” rates on all UK exports – as well as separately announced 25% levies on cars and steel.
Read more:
G7 summit ‘all about the Donald’ – analysis
Scrambled G7 agenda as leaders race to de-escalate Israel-Iran conflict
In a joint televised phone call in May, Sir Keir and Mr Trump announced the UK and US had agreed on a trade deal – but added the details were being finalised.
Ahead of the G7 summit, the prime minister said he would meet Mr Trump for “one-on-one” talks, and added the agreement “really matters for the vital sectors that are safeguarded under our deal, and we’ve got to implement that”.
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
Politics latest: Grooming gangs findings unveiled
The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
Read more on grooming gangs:
What we do and don’t know from the data
A timeline of the scandal
Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Sports2 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike