Madison news - feature: how will you get home tonight?

Every time you catch a cab, you’re entrusting your safety to a stranger. Clair Weaver looks at the recent spate of taxi assaults in Australia and asks why more isn’t being done to stop them.

It was a split-second decision that would change Jessica Loiterton’s life forever. Her head spinning after a few too many drinks, she was ready to go home after a girls’ night out at the Flinders Hotel, a trendy bar located in the clubbing district of Sydney’s Darlinghurst. Bundled into the front seat of a taxi and handed the fare by a friend who was supposed to have given her a lift home, she joked, “I hate you for doing this”, as the driver pulled away sharply with her door still open. It was the first sign of trouble to come.

The bright 18-year-old surrendered to a heavy-lidded doze as the cab began its 40-minute journey to her home, south of the city. Within moments, she was jolted awake as the taxi slammed into the car ahead. The damage was minor, but her driver, 23-year-old Mohammed Kowsar Ali – an accountancy student from Bangladesh who drove taxis part-time – pulled into a service station to swap details with the other car’s occupant, leaving the meter running. When they returned to the road, the taxi returned to its soporific rhythm. The effects of about eight drinks – vodka and oranges, Bacardi Breezers – were kicking in as Jessica again dozed off. Every time Ali stopped at a red light, he reached over to touch her. Jessica told him to leave her alone and squirmed away.

In the car’s security footage, recorded before Ali disabled the system, Jessica is pressed up against the window in a futile bid to maximise the distance between them. She tells madison that she considered jumping out, but was afraid; she had no idea where they were. Besides, it was after midnight, she was drunk and how else would she get home? By now, she thought, he must have got the message. Again, she nodded off. It was when Ali turned into an alley, slowed down and stopped, that things took a terrible turn. He pushed Jessica over the central console and into the back seat, pulled the mobile phone and money from her pocket and climbed on top of her. He tore one leg of her jeans, ripped off her underwear and began to rape her as she pleaded with him to stop. The rape lasted five minutes. For Jessica, a virgin, it seemed never-ending.
 
She eventually kicked one of her shoes onto the floor of the cab – thinking quickly, she knew it would be used as evidence. She then grabbed her mobile and managed to escape. Her harrowing emergency call, which was played at Ali’s trial, reduced some jurors to tears. Despite the trauma and shock, she managed to direct police to her whereabouts and gave them vital information that led to Ali’s arrest within minutes.
 
Ali was found guilty of rape and in November 2008 was sentenced to up to 10 years and eight months in jail. He will be deported to Bangladesh on his release. So justice, at least, has been done. But this is rarely the case. Most victims of sexual assault by taxi drivers don’t even report their ordeal. Only a few pursue it through the courts. And just a handful of these cases result in a prosecution, let alone a maximum sentence.

In NSW, there have been 72 formal complaints of sexual misconduct by taxi drivers to the government’s transport watchdog over the past two years. That’s a disturbing number, made worse by the fact that just one driver was charged – and his case was later dismissed. It’s the same elsewhere: in Victoria, there were 27 complaints lodged between 2008 and 2009. Fourteen were reported over a 21-month period from 2007 to 2009 in Adelaide. Two alleged assaults – of a 19-year-old woman and a disabled 30-year-old woman – took place in Toowoomba, Queensland, earlier this year. Brisbane driver Baljit Singh, 46, was jailed after sexually assaulting a 13-year-old schoolgirl on her way to visit her grandmother in 2008. And last year, Kok Foo Lim, 43, was jailed for 20 years after being exposed as one of Western Australia’s worst offenders; he’d posed as an off-duty taxi driver to pick up young drunk men from Perth nightspots, and sexually assaulted dozens of them. He videotaped many of the attacks.

Under-reporting by victims, combined with the fact research focuses on the overwhelming majority of women who are sexually assaulted by someone they know in a domestic location, means there is very little data and virtually no way of gauging the true risk of being targeted in a cab. It’s important to remember that most drivers are not sexual predators – statistically, they are actually more likely to be attacked by passengers – but there is still danger in complacency. After all, most of us don’t think twice about hopping into a cab; it’s an everyday transaction, like paying for a carton of milk or dropping off the dry-cleaning. Yet it’s not the same: once you shut the door, you’re in a closed environment where youimplicitly put yourself at the driver’s mercy. Normally, this isn’t a problem. The journeys are almost always uneventful. But the fact remains that rogue taxi drivers still commit sexual assaults – and get away with them.

Sydney driver Hassan Nagi, 37, raped a female passenger in 2003 and was never charged. He did it again in 2006. And 2007. It wasn’t until last year – after DNA evidence pinned him for all three rapes – that Nagi ended up in court, where he pleaded for leniency, claiming he suffered a type of sex addiction and was merely being “opportunistic” because the women were drunk. He still awaits sentencing. To any decent member of society, of course, that’s outrageous. Taxi drivers have a duty to bring passengers safely home, irrespective of their gender or condition. As Judge Peter Berman, who ruled over Jessica’s court case, said: “There must be many young women, vulnerable because of their intoxication, who get into taxis with strangers every night of the week. To take advantage of that situation is a very serious matter.”

So why do so few attacks come to light? And why are women so reluctant to come forward? Shame is a big obstacle, along with the fear they won’t be taken seriously if they were drunk or wearing revealing clothing. Indeed, the Australian Centre for the Study of Sexual Assault has found the public is three times as likely to blame a rape victim if they’ve been out clubbing, drinking and wearing a short skirt. It’s an unfortunate truth that Jessica learned during Ali’s trial. “After I came back from court one day on the train, my picture was on the front page and everyone was looking at me,” she says. “Some teenage girl sitting behind me said, ‘You were probably wearing a short skirt. You were probably asking for it.’ ”

It’s that kind of reaction that has likely led others to simply try and forget about their situation and move on, or seek counselling in private rather than make their plight public. Federal Minister for the Status of Women Tanya Plibersek knows from personal experience how hard it can be to seek help – one of her close friends was sexually assaulted at the age of 19. “The driver took her the wrong way through some very isolated land, pulled over and obviously wanted to have sex with her,” she says. “She got out of the situation by convincing him to masturbate in front of her... so she wasn’t physically assaulted, but it still affected her. She didn’t tell her parents because she thought they would never let her go out again, and she didn’t feel confident enough to go to the police. I’m sure that’s happened to many, many people.”
Plibersek believes that more education is needed about what constitutes sexual behaviour. “Sleazy behaviour is not on,” she says.

Carolyn Worth, convenor of the Victorian Centres Against Sexual Assault forum, says it takes a lot of resilience for a victim to pursue a complaint. “You have to go through quite a lot of intimate information with police,” she says. “Court is a daunting process and sexual assault is invariably committed in privacy... so it’s one person’s word against another’s.” Compounding the problem is the fact that sexual predators tend to choose easy targets like the drunk, the young and vulnerable.
 
By law, all cabs must display the driver’s identification number and the taxi number, as seen on the registration plate, so they may “easily be read” by passengers. This information is usually inside the passenger windshield or dashboard, and Michael Jools, president of the Taxi Drivers Association (TDA), suggests “it’s always a good idea to write down the taxi number or get a receipt, which carries both the ID and taxi number”. But in reality, passengers may struggle to see if it’s dark or feel uncomfortable taking down notes in full view of the driver’s rear-view mirror. What’s more, it’s absurd to think that anybody would be asking for a receipt after a sexual assault. In New York City, on the other hand, cabs are outfitted with large, multiple notices of the driver’s name, photograph, ID, a bill of rights and a complaint hotline number.

Across Australia, a raft of proposals has been put forward to tackle the problem. Safety cameras are fitted in taxis in WA, NSW, SA and Tasmania. They are now being installed in the Queensland fleet. But the footage isn’t continuous, recording as little as one image per 10 seconds. It’s also rarely kept beyond a 24-hour period. Karen Willis, manager of the NSW Rape Crisis Centre, is campaigning for mandatory full-time tamper-proof camera surveillance with routine external monitoring, because unless you take down your driver’s ID or taxi number, cab companies may be unable to track them down afterwards – even with pick-up and drop-off details. This is especially complicated in urban areas where thousands of cabs are on the road at any one time, or if the driver has failed to log on to an onboard computer system. (Internal GPS vehicle trackers are required in some jurisdictions but not all.) Willis also wants panic buttons for passengers. “We have raised this issue, but every time the cab companies come back and say it will cost too much,” she says.

Blair Davies, executive director of the Australian Taxi Industry Association, says national training standards due to be introduced later this year will ensure all drivers receive the same education on sexual harassment. “Drivers are not to take advantage of passengers,” he says. “They are there to provide a service. Their position is a privileged one. It’s a position of trust. We need to do everything we can to make sure that trust is earned and protected.” He argues panic buttons are unnecessary in licensed cabs, as drivers undergo criminal history checks and training. But the TDA’s Jools supports a panic button and is lobbying governments for continuous camera surveillance. “We also want an in-car display that shows what’s being filmed,” he says. “And we believe the cameras should record continuously, with audio. We need a storage unit that keeps footage for 100 days or more.”

Jessica says she hoped that by publicly standing up to her attacker and waiving the anonymity automatically granted as the victim of a sexual assault, she would give other women the courage to do the same. But it hasn’t worked out that way. “I was hoping it would start a chain reaction – this one came forward and she got justice so others would, too. But I don’t think girls have the confidence.” She speaks to other victims and has accompanied one to court.
 
But despite her bravery, the experience has irrevocably changed Jessica. She is much more careful about planning her days, is haunted by flashbacks of her attack and is reluctant to catch cabs. “I always wonder what my life would be like if it had never happened,” she says. “My whole life changed in an hour, but it seemed like forever.”

This article was published in the July 2010 issue of madison. It won the Best Magazine Report/Article at the 2011 Eliminating Violence Against Women Media Awards in June 2011.