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Sexual harassment of students on public transport: an exploratory study in Lucknow, India

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Crime Prevention and Community Safety Aims and scope

A Correction to this article was published on 19 June 2018

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Abstract

Studies suggest that incidents of sexual harassment are common occurrence on public transport in India, but there is little reliable data to understand and tackle the problem. This research explores actual and witnessed victimisations as well as perceptions of the risk by a sample of 200 tertiary female students in Lucknow, India. Consistent with literature, sexual harassment victimisation appears to be most prevalent in buses and increases with the frequency of use of public transport. We found that the number of incidents experienced as a victim and as a witness were comparable, suggesting events of sexual harassment are not widely noticed by other passengers, perhaps because they are so commonplace as not to be especially noticed. Finally, the respondents felt female students were particularly targeted amongst women more generally, but did not identify any specific risk factors in relation to the profiles of the offenders or victims.

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  • 19 June 2018

    The article Sexual harassment of students on public transport: an exploratory study in Lucknow, India written by K. Tripathi, H. Borrion and J. Belur was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 7 September 2017 without open access.

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Acknowledgements

This work supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) [EP/K503745/1]. The authors would like to thank Mahila Samman Prakoshtha of Uttar Pradesh police for granting permissions for the study, Yeh Ek Soch Foundation for sharing its experience in dealing with issues of sexual harassment in Lucknow, and the twenty students of Department of Social Work at University of Lucknow for assisting with the data collection process. We are grateful to the editor and the reviewers for their comments.

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  1. UCL Department of Security and Crime Science, 35 Tavistock Square, London, WC1H 9EZ, UK

    Kartikeya Tripathi, Hervé Borrion & Jyoti Belur

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  1. Kartikeya Tripathi
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  2. Hervé Borrion
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  3. Jyoti Belur
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Correspondence to Hervé Borrion.

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Tripathi, K., Borrion, H. & Belur, J. Sexual harassment of students on public transport: an exploratory study in Lucknow, India. Crime Prev Community Saf 19, 240–250 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41300-017-0029-0

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