Taking the U-Bahn with Alex Born is a lesson in vigilance. The singer and activist, 35, has been assaulted multiple times on public transport in Berlin, and has stepped in to help other victims many times, including challenging a perpetrator to delete ‘up skirting’ photos he had taken of another woman on the train.
On the U5 one recent rush-hour morning, she points out a man staring at us from down the carriage, his eyes darting from her face to mine, scanning our bodies. He moves closer, making to get off the train, but instead leans back against the glass partition and continues to watch us, less than a metre away.
If you know that you’re filmed, and still you don’t care, then it’s obviously not enough to prevent men from committing a crime.
We reach Alexanderplatz, and Born shows me the safety issues on the platform: the lack of staff, and the hiding places perpetrators could use to avoid being seen by the BVG’s cameras – behind pillars, and in the indentations of walls.
Born has good reason to be wary. In 2015, she was violently sexually assaulted by a man who followed her off the U-Bahn one night and broke into her apartment. In the footage from the station cameras, shown to her in the lead-up to his trial, she saw how he “followed me like an animal”, using the station’s blind spots so she couldn’t detect him until it was too late.
In Berlin, such crimes remain rare, but they are on the rise. The number of recorded sexual offences on BVG vehicles and at stops increased by 15% between 2023 and 2024, from 246 to 283, as revealed by a parliamentary inquiry from the Green Party in the Berlin House of Representatives. More than 90% of perpetrators were male; more than 90% of victims female.
Born now cycles around the city during the daytime instead of taking public transport, but at night the U-Bahn becomes her only option. “Since I come back from gigs at night, it’s hard to find where FLINTA* people are. Usually [the train] is full of adult cis men, a lot of them drunk, and it doesn’t feel comfortable. I feel like it’s going into a pack of vultures, you know?”
So far, Born has only found a sticking plaster solution: in April, she created a petition directed at the BVG to introduce FLINTA*-only carriages on Berlin’s trams, buses, U-Bahn and S-Bahn (the latter of which is operated by Deutsche Bahn).
In Born’s proposal, the carriages would be clearly marked using purple seats, and posters carrying messages about consent and harassment would be placed throughout the trains. To date, over 23,000 people have signed in agreement.
Women-only carriages in subways and trains have existed for decades in some countries, including India, where a “Ladies Special” train was introduced on the Mumbai Suburban Railway back in 1992. Brazil, Bangladesh, Egypt, Japan, India, Iran, Indonesia, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Taiwan and the Philippines have installed something similar.
But the evidence of their effectiveness is patchy. In Japan, reports of lewd behaviour dropped by 3% in the first year after the carriages were introduced, while in Mexico City, the number of sexual assaults on the metro dropped by just 2.9%, with hundreds of cases still recorded each year.
The idea has also been trialled elsewhere in Germany. In 2016, the private German rail operator Mitteldeutsche Regiobahn (MRB) introduced women-only compartments on its service between Leipzig and Chemnitz, but the measure was criticised by many transport experts – and some politicians – with a Left Party lawmaker in Saxony’s state parliament, Marco Böhme, saying the special womens’ compartments were a “step towards going back to the Middle Ages”.
Nevertheless, the idea has political backing in Berlin from the Greens, who are submitting a proposal for women-only carriages to the House of Representatives. “It’s not 100% what I want for my city or public transport – I want a city where everybody can be free,” says Antje Kapek, the Greens’ spokeswoman for transport policy in the Berlin House of Representatives.
Kapek started the campaign last November in response to a rape case on the U3 in Zehlendorf. “I was quite shocked, because I thought, you know, we have video surveillance in every train on every station, how can they dare to rape someone? If you know that you’re filmed, and still you don’t care, then it’s obviously not enough to prevent men from committing a crime.”
Kapek says she worries for her own daughter, 11, who travels alone on the U-Bahn to school. She has recently taken to telling her to wear baggier clothes on board so as not to attract unwanted attention. “It’s just extremely sad to think like that. Of course, it’s not only women who are victims of sexual harassment, but it’s almost always men being the aggressor. It’s a male problem.”
The Greens’ draft proposal, obtained by The Berliner, calls for women-only carriages to be available across the transport network, including the S-Bahn, trams and buses, as well as increasing security with better lighting, emergency intercoms, and, as Born suggests, consent messaging.
The draft proposal does not use the term FLINTA*, but instead says other “vulnerable” groups should be protected on public transport, particularly at night – an omission that has disappointed activists such as Born, who points out that gendered violence is experienced equally by FLINTA* people, with trans people at particular risk. “I’m so happy the Greens are doing this, but I hate that it’s just women because I have so many queer friends as well, and my heart is just bleeding if people get discriminated against.”
Kapek says she understands the criticism, but that politically, focusing on women first is essential in order to get protections passed. “We’re talking about ‘women-only’ because everyone understands what that means, and the majority of the public doesn’t understand what FLINTA* is, but we will make it clear the approach includes [the whole community].”
So far, the BVG has been unmoved by calls for change, saying that it has expanded security and hired more officers over recent years, and that it has more than 6,000 cameras across its stations and thousands more inside its vehicles.
Having separate carriages “is not possible either”, a spokesperson told The Berliner, “because our vehicles do not have separate carriages; instead, you can walk through from front to back.” Of course, culture is set at the top, and it doesn’t help that so few women work for the BVG; just 12% of its bus drivers and 18.6% of its U-Bahn drivers are women.
Kapek maintains that women-only carriages would be not only simply to install, but a cost-effective solution at a time when transport budgets are being slashed. “Every other mechanism they can introduce would cost more money than these carriages, where you only need a bit of colour and some information material. And you should expect people to stick to the rules.”
