The most troubling part about Alix Kemp’s ride on a city bus last week wasn’t the man who sexually harassed her the entire time.
It was that no one — not the bus driver or her fellow passengers — stepped in to help.
Kemp was waiting for the bus on Whyte Avenue and 109th Street on Nov. 29. It was around 6 p.m., and inside the bus shelter a man was harassing a woman next to Kemp on the bench.
The woman was upset. Kemp said she told the man to back off. The man then directed his insults at her instead, calling her a “f—ing whore” and making kissing noises.
The man, who Kemp said was in his 40s, tall and skinny with grey hair, boarded the No. 9 bus alongside her a few minutes later.
She immediately told the driver she was being harassed.
“He basically just told me to go sit down,” she said.
Most of the seats on the bus were taken. Kemp found a spot at the back near the man who was harassing her.
He soon resumed making the kissing noises and “mimicking oral sex,” Kemp said. She again called up to the bus driver.
The harasser then went up to the bus driver and spoke with him briefly, she said, before coming back to his seat, grinning at Kemp on the way.
Nobody did anything, the bus driver didn’t do anything, nobody stood up for me. I was really upset.– Alix Kemp
“I was so disgusted and I was so angry. I started making a big deal about it. I was shouting, ‘This guy is harassing me, aren’t you going to do anything?’ And everybody on the bus was staring at me in silence,” Kemp said.
“Nobody did anything. The bus driver didn’t do anything, nobody stood up for me. I was really upset.”
Kemp said a woman on the bus got mad at her for interrupting the commute.
She got off at her stop 10 minutes later, worried the man would follow her.
Kemp filed a complaint with the Edmonton Transit Service that night and reached out to her city councillor, Michael Walters.
In an email, Walters promised Kemp he would bring the issue to ETS management.
The city says it is investigating Kemp’s complaint. (CBC/Sam Martin)
City has ‘zero tolerance’ policy
Kemp told the bus driver about the harassment because, she said, that’s what a City of Edmonton campaign tells commuters to do.
The city has “zero tolerance for any form of harassment on transit,” according to the city’s website. A city campaign urges commuters to report harassment to a “uniformed ETS employee.”
Last week, city council approved an initiative for city administration to work with police and the public to develop a system to share data about sexual and verbal harassment and assault.
Walters said he found Kemp’s experience “sickening” and said transit safety is a priority for council.
He doesn’t want to blame the driver for what happened, he said, but added drivers should have ongoing training so that they feel empowered to step in when they see harassment.
“That’s not an experience we want anybody to have, and the city’s responsibility is to do as much as it can to prevent that from happening,” he said.
City spokeswoman Tara Kongsrude said drivers are trained on how to deal with sexual harassment.
If drivers encounter harassment toward passengers on their buses, they can call for a peace officer to meet them at a stop. The person causing problems could then be removed from the bus, she said.
‘He got away with it’
Kemp said she heard from It’s Time Edmonton on Twitter, the city’s gender-based violence and sexual assault prevention initiative. They promised to share her experience with the city’s transit department to improve its systems.
She said she’s happy to know the city is working toward creating safer public spaces for women but is concerned change isn’t happening fast enough.
“This is something that’s been a problem for a long time,” Kemp said.
“I need to see evidence that they’re actually going to follow through on that. It seems really problematic to me to put out a campaign saying ‘report harassment to a uniformed ETS officer’ if you haven’t done the legwork to train drivers how to take that seriously.”
Kemp worries ETS employees aren’t trained properly in what to do if they are told about harassment. If they were, she thinks the bus driver would have handled the situation differently.
Because nothing happened, she’s worried her harasser’s behaviour will continue to be a problem, putting other women at risk.
“I feel like this guy is now emboldened to know that he’ll get away with it,” Kemp said.
“Because he did, he got away with it.”