A UCL student‘s petition calling for Transport for London (TfL) to introduce women-only Underground carriages has quickly gathered over 12,000 signatures.
Camille Brown, 21, is holding TfL and London Mayor Sadiq Khan accountable for not taking appropriate action in making public transport safer for women after a rise in sexual offences on London’s transport network.
TfL statistics show there were 907 reported sexual offences across its services in the first six months of 2025, which is an increase from 879 over the same timeframe in 2024.
Brown said: “I’m actually really sick of hearing TfL say they’ve got all these systems in place.
“They’re all retrospect, they’re all in the aftermath, they’re all reactive. It’s too late and that’s not good enough.
“TfL enables women to become victims, and I don’t want to see any more young women become victims or have a story to tell.”
A survey by British Transport Police revealed over a third of women have been sexually harassed while commuting on the tube, while only one in five witnesses report it.
Brown’s activism was prompted by her own experiences of harassment since her childhood, and was reinforced after visiting Kenwood Ladies’ Pond in Hampstead Heath.
She said: “I feel this really amazing sense of security that I don’t feel anywhere else.
“I’ve never been in a women’s-only space like that, and it’s so polarised to the feeling that I feel on the tube.”
Trains have been a part of Brown’s life since she was aged 11, sending daily ‘SAS’ (safely at school) updates to her family group chat.
She recalled countless incidents of harassment from when she was in school uniform to traveling to university, describing herself as ‘hyper vigilant’ and constantly in ‘fight, flight, freeze mode’.
Despite the growing support for the petition, some women expressed concern towards the movement, calling it ‘a backwards step; for women and worrying it rejects holding the offenders accountable.
Brown said: “The crime rate against women is still increasing, which implies to me that [TfL] schemes that have been implemented for years are not working.
“I don’t think there is such a thing as a backward step. I think it’s just reacting to the times that you’re in.
“To re-circuit men’s brains to be respectful of women is not an overnight fix, whereas utilising the infrastructure that we have in our cities can be an overnight fix.”
Despite the petition standing at 12,093 signatures at the time of publication, TfL does not believe implementing women-only carriages on the Underground network represents a solution.
TfL security, policing and enforcement director 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, including the use of intelligence-led policing operations to target offenders and hotspot locations.
“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.”
To view the petition, click here.
Feature image: Free to use from Pixabay
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