Figures on exactly how prevalent a problem this is are hard to come by, in part because of how seldom cases are formally reported. But in the US, a recent inquest found that in-flight sexual assaults in the US tripled over five years, prompting an FBI investigation. Just this month, a lawsuit was filed against Southwest Airlines after a 16-year-old boy was assaulted by a registered paedophile on a flight from San Diego to Portland. The American carrier is being blamed for failing to protect the victim because of its unpopular non-assigned seating policy, meaning children are often separated from their parents and end up next to strangers.
Anecdotally, most of the women I asked had at least one tale to share about inappropriate conduct from a man on a plane. I, myself, was kissed squarely on the lips by a middle-aged lesbian upon landing in Australia in my late teens. “Sorry!” she giggled, having chatted to me enthusiastically (platonically, I assumed) for the duration of the flight, “I just had to!” It remains one of the most bizarre moments I have ever experienced. I recall other passengers looking flabbergasted. Had she been male, it would no doubt have been taken more seriously.
Quite why certain people are so emboldened to throw themselves at their fellow travellers within the confines of a plane cabin is an interesting topic. There seems to be a sense of lawlessness that takes over at 35,000 feet; where people take off their shoes, knock back booze at any time of day or night and fart with reckless abandon. You’re also far more likely to cry on a plane, especially when you’re alone – the phenomenon of the “mile cry club” – which some social scientists put down to “stranger intimacy”.
GP Dr Nick Knight, who has a special interest in lifestyle medicine, tells Telegraph Travel: “You’re in an unfamiliar environment, at altitude, away from your comforts of everyday life, surrounded by strangers. Sprinkle in your likely altered human physiology with lower air pressures and oxygen levels and your body and mind go into emotional lability.”
Regardless of why it happens, this isn’t exclusive to air travel. Sexual assaults on the London Underground are well documented (and on the rise, according to the British Transport Police; with 909 reported between 2022 and 2023). So widespread is the problem in some parts of the world, that gender segregated cabins are not uncommon on trains in India and Asia.
And let’s not forget France’s “Safer Plage” beach patrols last year, which unleashed somewhat dystopian “marshalls” onto the shores of Marseille to tackle leery sunbathers. I argued then, as I do now, that such interventions unnerve me in the same way burqas and same-sex schools do. We shouldn’t be institutionally separating men from women because the former “can’t be trusted” and the latter are “too distracting”. In the long run, it is the job of parents to teach their sons not to be pests and their daughters not to put up with it.
So where does that leave air travel? I see no particular harm in letting women choose not to sit next to men on planes, or vice versa. As I touched upon before, the more options the better when it comes to seating. Why there aren’t already separate cabins for families with small children is beyond me, and I say this as someone with a two-year-old who wouldn’t be at all offended if we were curtained off.
I would also pay a premium to avoid being next to someone who plans to eat yoghurt (the smell repulses me) or in front of anyone who is going to winge when I recline my seat to sleep on a long-haul flight. Frequent surveys over the years have found this topic, in particular, to be hugely polarising, with about half of travellers being in favour of the right to recline and the other half willing to stab someone for leaning back. Why not let all the recliners sit in the back portion of the economy cabin and prop the upright brigade in the front?
Any booking system which gives us more control over an environment as socially contentious as flying is a step in the right direction, as far as I’m concerned. And if that includes sanctioned sexism, then so be it.