Antje Kapek, the transport policy speaker for the Green Party in Berlin, has called for the introduction of train carriages for exclusive use by female passengers. This follows a shocking upsurge in serious sex crimes on trains and buses, with Berlin alone experiencing the equivalent of more than one such assault every day. Frankfurt is heading in a similar direction.
Transport hubs across Germany are becoming less safe. Federal Police recorded 13,543 violent crimes at train stations in the first half of 2024. This has led to the suggestion that a model found in Japan, India, and Indonesia―and the ‘family carriages’ of the Doha Metro―be adopted in Berlin. It involves carriages set aside for female passengers only, whether all day or at peak times (such as 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. in Tokyo).
Critics point out that such changes to ticketing and rolling stock would leave the basic problem intact, that of sexual aggression from men. For the German Greens, this points to a separate issue they would rather not discuss: the actual men being arrested for these offences. When news outlet NiUS analysed a list of the names of suspected rapists from North Rhine-Westphalia, it concluded that 55.8 percent of the perpetrators were either not German or from a migrant background.
The Greens—who fully supported the opening of Germany’s borders in 2015—would sooner not address the fact that men from specific communities are disproportionately represented in the crime statistics compared to their numbers within the overall population. Women-only train carriages would respond to a symptom of the problem, in the deflection-oriented style preferred by the collapsed traffic light coalition government.
Other examples of this approach involve telling railway staff in Thuringia that ticket inspection is now discretionary and that conductors can opt out of checking the credentials of passengers who appear to be foreign, due to the threat of assault. Nationally, faced with a wave of stabbing, the authorities are considering a ban on knives in public with blades over 6 cm in length. This focus by the government on objects rather than perpetrators helps explain why German voters are growing bemused and angry with the official failure to grasp the nettle of violent crime.
One wrinkle in policy that the Greens still need to iron out concerns about who would get into a women-only carriage. Recently, they welcomed new legislation that makes ‘changing gender’ from the age of 14 into something that can be done annually at a registry office by ‘self-identification’ as something to “make our society more open, more democratic and more diverse.” For Germany’s determined sex offenders, entering women-only carriages shouldn’t prove too difficult in the future. To everyone else, it looks as if society is going off the rails.
