A teenage girl allegedly sexually assaulted on a bus.
Pinned against a window.
In broad daylight.
With school students looking on.
And no one did a thing to help.
It’s a highly distressing situation that occurred last Friday on a Gold Coast bus.
The police have now arrested a man over the alleged attack.
The victim, an 18-year-old woman, was travelling on a Surfside bus in the middle of the afternoon.
The Courier Mail reported that the young woman was pinned against a window and sexually assaulted.
“But no one, including the driver, came to her aid.”
Her alleged attacker’s image was released on CCTV yesterday.
The footage showed a man in his 50’s wearing a flannelette shirt pushing up against the young woman.
Her mother spoke to The Courier Mail before the man’s arrest.
“Bus drivers are not allowed to interfere, which is fair enough, but someone has to,” she said.
“They should have emergency buttons like they have on trains.”
“Or bus drivers should have some sort of procedure where they push a distress button and head straight to the nearest police station.”
“If this is happening in broad daylight, you can only imagine what’s happening late at night,” she said.
The police expressed concern to Seven News over the number of attacks on Gold Coast buses.
Earlier in the year, Mamamia reported on an elderly Indigenous man who was racially abused and attacked, and there have been three separate attacks on bus drivers over the past few months.
The man who attacked the 18-year-old woman now faces court.
Top Comments
I read yesterday that studies have show you are more likely to gety help from a bystander if you address them directly, rather than just calling for help in general.
""Hey you in the hat, help me!"
Worth a shot if you're ever in trouble.
It's completely disappointing, and quite frankly, disgusting that nobody steps in to assist when they see another person in trouble. We now live in a selfish culture of ~pretend to be busy on your phone and that you didn't see~. I fully understand that many of the bus passengers were young students and they themselves may have felt endangered, but there's no excuse for them not immediately contacting the police and there's also no excuse for the grown adults who stood around doing nothing.
Unfortunately, bystander incidents like these are so commonplace. Some years ago, my then 14 year old friend was sexually harassed on a train while a bevy of middle-aged business men kept their eyes glued to their newspapers and blackberrys. And just last month I was stalked and verbally/physically assaulted by a homeless man at a busy bus stop where it took 15 minutes for someone to intervene to help me. I'm forever grateful for that Good Samaritan, but I was so appalled and couldn't believe the other 20 or so people just staring at their phones and purposely ignoring what was occurring around them. It seems most people don't have a lot of empathy these days.
If you ever see someone in trouble, I beg you to please put yourself in their shoes and do something to help. At the very least, please contact the police.
Exactly. At the very least while you're looking down at your phone avoiding eye contact, call the friggin police.