A woman says a group of boys threatened to stab and spit on her on a train from Frome, while a member of staff and other passengers did nothing to help her. Danielle Clarke told Bristol Live that four boys started harassing her on a Great Western Railway train heading for Bristol Temple Meads on Sunday April 3 around 5pm.
The 26-year-old from Bristol says the boys, who she says were aged between 12 and 14, surrounded her on her table as she sat alone and bullied her, which she called it “awful”. “I just felt helpless like no one was going to help me. It’s one of those things, I kept thinking I should have done something a little different but I fought back” , she said.
She yelled at the boys to leave but they harassed her repeatedly. “They said give us your Instagram and we’ll leave, they kept blowing on my face, touching my face, touching my ear,” she said.
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Danielle says one of the boys threatened to stab her. When a staff member on the train passed her, she asked for help, but she says he just asked for her ticket repeatedly. She says the staff member then asked the boys to leave the train at the next stop before walking away.
A GWR spokesperson apologized and said: “Our staff are trained to handle incidents for the safety of all on board, however, ultimately only the police are able to investigate an incident. felony allegation.” Danielle says that while she was being harassed, no one else on the train tried to help her except for another woman, who the boys yelled at.
The group of boys left the train at the next station, but she said one of them spat on her as they left. Danielle stayed on the train until she reached Temple Meads. She said what the boys did to her was “awful”, but she also criticized the passengers and the staff member who did not help her.
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She says that before she got off the train, she asked the staff member why he hadn’t helped her, and he apologized and told her he didn’t want to get in trouble for manhandling the boys, and that he had been assaulted while at work before. But Danielle said: “It’s pathetic, there’s such a lack of help to feel so helpless in broad daylight when you’re asking for help, when you’re literally asking someone for help, c disgusting. I’ve completely lost faith in people to be honest.”
When Danielle got off the train she was in tears and a member of staff saw her and escorted her to the station police office, where she filed a complaint. She says she didn’t get much sleep that night and the day after the incident she couldn’t go to work, and although she’s a ‘confident’ person, the incident shook her .
“I went to the shops yesterday and I can just feel a bit taken aback by it, and I’m not really looking at anyone. To be honest, it really blew me away.” But she also said she felt abandoned by the police as they told her the boys were known to them and suggested it was unlikely they could do anything because of the poor video surveillance.
And Danielle said: “It makes sense that things like this happen every day because nobody is doing anything about it, there are always women’s rights movements but what’s the point when things like It happens every day and no one intervenes.” Her family are supporting her and have written to some Bristol MPs, while Danielle’s aunt Nicky Alpin said the incident was ‘horrible’ and could have ended much worse as no one stood up for her niece.
Nicky said: “She’s so upset about it all, you shouldn’t feel at 26 on public transport that you’re left to defend yourself. I mean, what if they had a knife, would that another headline that someone was tragically stabbed on a train with a guard leaving someone who was clearly asking for help?”
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Source: www.somersetlive.co.uk
This notice was published: 2022-04-06 08:36:19
