Air India may segregate some women passengers for their own safety

By B.R.

SEGREGATION on airlines has a long history. Sometimes it is understandable. Carriers’ business models depend on them drawing a curtain between those of us stuffed into economy-class seats and our betters who have paid for lie-flat beds. Other times it has been immoral. While racial segregation on American planes was never legal, in some airports during the first half of the 20th century it was the norm to insist that blacks did not mix with whites in the terminals.

That particular outrage has been consigned to the past. But new forms of segregation are replacing it. This time, though, they are less to do with enshrining differences and more for the benefit of those being segregated. Or so the argument goes.

On 11th January, Ashwani Lohani, the boss of Air India, toldThe Hindu newspaper that the carrier plans to reserve six seats in the front rows of its aeroplanes for women passengers who are travelling alone. As the paper explains:

The move assumes significance, as it comes soon after an on-board incident in Air India’s Mumbai-Newark flight late last month where a flyer reportedly groped a woman co-passenger. During the flight, a business class passenger changed his seat to sit next to a female passenger in the economy class and allegedly groped her when she fell asleep.

Separation when travelling feels like a trend. Japan has had female-only carriages on some of its commuter trains for over a decade. Their introduction was a reaction to a record number of women complaining that they had been groped on Tokyo trains. In 2004, police said that 2,201 women had reported being inappropriately touched while riding the metro; one survey found that 64% of women in their 20s and 30s had experienced such a sexual assault. It is not only on planes and trains. Some business hotels, for example, have experimented with women-only floors. Female taxi services can be found in many cities around the world.

This is all unfortunate, but understandable. Surveys of women who travel for business have found that staying safe is their biggest concern. It is difficult to find statistics on how the perception of danger while on the road matches up to the reality. But that is not necessarily the point. If some women feel vulnerable when travelling alone, they have the right to have that uneasy feeling countered.

Still, it is a conundrum. Segregation might be a short-term solution, but it is no answer if we want to change attitudes in the long term. Much better to mitigate the causes of the problems, rather than simply hive of sections of travellers. Take the Air India case above (the details of which are still far from clear). In a similar situation, solutions might range from placing solo women next to families, to questioning why on earth a man might want to swap a business class seat for one next to a young woman flying on her own.

There is a further issue. The more others are segregated from us, the more we expect similar treatment for our own clans. El Al flights, for example, have been disrupted in recent years as haredi (ultra-orthodox) Jews have refused to sit next to women who have been assigned an adjacent seat, as their faith prohibits contact with a non-related female. Planes can get stuck on the runway as the innocent women are pressured (sometimes by employees of the airline, it seems) into swapping seats.

One mooted solution has been to have an area in the cabin set aside on El Al flights for haredi. But that is a slippery slope. If everyone got their way, and cut themselves off from those who offended their sensibilities, planes would soon run out of space. Some Asian carriers have now introduced child-free zones where passengers can put distance between themselves and anyone inconsiderate enough not to have grown into a fully functioning human being.

In the long term, harmony tends to arise when people are not forcefully segregated. Having said that, Gulliver would be all in favour of cordoning off part of every plane for the sole use of middle-aged, bearded British travel bloggers.