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Original poster

20p (warning - triggering)

50 replies

enimmead · 09/06/2012 21:34

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-18373422

I'm sure you've heard the story. A 22 year old woman was turfed off a bus at 3am because she did was short of 20p on a £5 fare. CCTV showed her spending 8 mins looking for the money.

No one offered her the money. She left the bus and walked through a park to meet her mum. She was violently raped and had horrendous head injuries.

All for 20p.

It breaks my heart.

OP posts:
5Fingered · 09/06/2012 23:37

Was there other people on the bus? Why would anyone NOT hand the poor woman 20p?? selfish bastards. You wouldn't even notice that missing would you.

Hope the bus driver is proud of himself.

UnnamedFemaleProtagonist · 09/06/2012 23:45

That is so sickening. I would have offered it to her in a heartbeat. Jesus fucking Christ.

LRDtheFeministDragon · 09/06/2012 23:51

That is awful, but the person we need to be angry with is the rapist. Not the bus driver or the other passengers.

FWIW, I used know that bit of Nottingham, and unless a lot has changed, there would be plenty of people near Forest Fields who would miss 20p. It's not 'selfish bastards'.

MiniTheMinx · 10/06/2012 08:54

How sad we are in a situation where so many people would miss 20p.

Absolutely shocking and whilst I think our anger should be with the rapist, I am also upset that people lack compassion and that material deprivation, social inequality and the money economy has/does shape the way people think and behave towards others.......for the worst.

CailinDana · 10/06/2012 09:05

It's a shocking situation but I agree with LRD, the rapist was to blame not the driver or the passengers. The driver might have had a tonne of people that day trying to get off the fair and had reached his limit. The other passengers might have been afraid to get involved. You just don't know what was going on with them really. Whatever it was, they didn't do anything illegal, even though it was unkind. I feel very sorry for them really as they will blame themselves.

Original poster
enimmead · 10/06/2012 09:18

The sad thing is - women should be able to walk the streets at night safely. But in the world we live in, they can't.

The driver knew that. The passengers knew that. The victim knew that.
But she was abandoned.
For 20p.

The rapist is to blame. But I think those people who abandoned her have something on their conscience.

She was abandoned and left alone at 3am.

For 20p.

It breaks my heart.

OP posts:
Original poster
enimmead · 10/06/2012 09:44

I just hope this story makes people think about how vulnerable women are in such a situation and no other women are abandoned at night like this again.

It takes an awful thing like this to happen to change attitudes.

OP posts:
WinkyWinkola · 10/06/2012 09:52

Rapist to blame but even if she hadn't got raped, what kind of people turn a woman out onto the streets for the sake of 20p? It's cold, dark and dangerous. Pathetic and shameful. And I think they should have anger directed at them even if it were broad daylight.

chibi · 10/06/2012 09:59

is this the way forward, a kind of harm reduction strategy? the streets are full of violent rapists, and it can't be helped, much as certain stretches of coastline are shark infested. thus the best we can do is to jointly take resposibility for protecting women from these predators?

if we are going to construct rape as an occupational hazard of being a woman i would prefer that we are issued high calibre weaponry at birth, rather than the occasional 20p piece chipped in to keep us safe

thechairmanmeow · 10/06/2012 10:06

the rapist alone is to blame
no bus driver is going to pay part of the fair for anyone, where would that end?
maybe it got heated between her and the busdriver and other people diddnt want to get involved, but even if they were being stingey, they are not to blame for what happend afterwards, only guilty of being tight-fisted.

how many of you have walked passed a homeless female and done nothing?

it's easy to get all judgemental with the aid of 20/20 hindsight.

the one thing i dont get, be it just a detail, is 4,80 the lowest fair? couldnt she have at least got part of the way and walked the rest?

maybe it's that i have lived outside the uk for a long time so to me 4,80 is what it used to be in the 90's.

WinkyWinkola · 10/06/2012 10:16

I think it best to keep the two issues separate.

Issue I. Anger at the rapist because he would rape whatever.

Issue II. Contempt for those who couldn't even give a woman 20p.

TunipTheVegemal · 10/06/2012 10:24

I don't understand why everyone's assuming the other passengers all knew what was going on. On some buses there's quite a distance between where the driver sits and even the front seats, and with the engine running I wouldn't expect to be able to hear what the driver and someone getting on were saying to each other. Plus quite a few people on a bus are usually reading/listening to music/on their mobiles so don't take much notice of their surroundings anyway.
All this 'no-one would give her 20p' stuff - did she ask them?
If the bus was stopped for 8 minutes people might have realised something was up but that doesn't mean they knew what.

LRDtheFeministDragon · 10/06/2012 11:14

Good point tunip.

I know people have suggested (and possibly even organized) systems for students whereby they can ring a number if they end up stranded without money, and someone will come get them. That - and things like streetlights, or extra police patrols, or whatever - are really reassuring and do make you feel more safe. I can believe they reduce mugging.

But why so many harsh terms like 'contempt' or 'shameful' directed to people who were just passengers or just doing their job? Bus drivers aren't exactly known for being well paid and if he lets her on, he has to make it up out of his own pocket or risk getting sacked if he does it too often. It's not going to be a one-off, is it?

chairman makes a good point about homeless women on the streets.

LRDtheFeministDragon · 10/06/2012 11:20

I am pretty sure that if her rapist raped somebody who happened to get off a bus they expected to take - ie., somebody not even following their usual pattern, someone who was there by chance - he was going to rape someone. This woman happened to be in the wrong place and it is awful. But I think he would have done it anyway. There's no chance of there not being women on the streets in that area. He would have found someone.

MateyM00 · 10/06/2012 11:25

If everyone on that bus KNEW that she would be raped if she left the bus, they would all have given her it.

no-one knowingly let that girl get raped.

Your outrage is misplaced.

I feel for the girl, obviously, what a terrible thing to have happened.

MarySA · 10/06/2012 11:32

I think somebody on the bus should have paid the 20p. After all it wasn't the £5 she was asking for. And also the bus driver could have used his discretion.

crazy88 · 10/06/2012 11:35

Just as an aside, when my dh lived in Toronto, it was common practice for bus drivers to drop women off as close to their homes as possible at night, rather than at bus stops. Ironic as Toronto one of the safest cities in the world apparently (recent random gun shootings aside!)

LRDtheFeministDragon · 10/06/2012 11:42

mary, how often can the bus driver 'use his discretion' before he gets sacked?

And what if the other people on the bus didn't have 20p, or weren't asked, or weren't listening as tunip says?

It's interesting how many people now are saying 'oh, they should have given the 20p' where you just know that if we asked on AIBU 'would you have given a woman who was begging on the bus for her fare money', loads of people would say no.

WinkyWinkola · 10/06/2012 11:44

Well it's not safe for a young woman alone on the streets at 3am whether you know she's going to get raped or not.

Even if she had got home safely, she should not have been kicked off the bus.

LRDtheFeministDragon · 10/06/2012 11:51

The answer isn't to demonize the bus driver and other passengers.

It's not safe. There are possible ways to make it safer. This is not one of them.

Birdsgottafly · 10/06/2012 11:58

"I don't understand why everyone's assuming the other passengers all knew what was going on"

The woman held the bus up begging to be let on for eight minutes. There was a camera on the bus and this has been recorded, apparently.

LRDtheFeministDragon · 10/06/2012 12:02

If you're on a bus in a dodgy area late at night, do you always go downstairs and check what's going on?

Yes, I really hope if we'd all been on the bus, we'd have thought it was awful and given her 20p. But we can't know that and we might well instead have judged her or felt scared about someone who argued for 8 minutes. It's easy to feel sure now.

If we had been there, and we had given her 20p, how does that change the fact there was, that night, a rapist wandering around an area of Nottingham where there are likely to be lots of young women on the streets and vulnerable?

TheMonster · 10/06/2012 12:04

Was she drunk though? Maybe people didn't want to be sharing a bus home with an intoxicated woman who might puke everywhere.
I don't think demonising the other passengers or the driver is right.
The moral is to make sure you can get home safely.

LRDtheFeministDragon · 10/06/2012 12:07

Sorry, I think I'm banging on about this so I should shut up.

But NO, the moral isn't to make sure you can get home safely. The moral is to get rapists to stop raping.

If she had got home safely, that almost certainly would not protect some other unlucky woman, probably someone homeless or maybe a prostitute on the streets out there, from being raped.