There isn’t anything of the sort in my experience.
But is that experience relevant beyond being one random account?
Are we talking about the same thing here? I can see how certain railway employees would be obliged to report signs of substance abuse in certain colleagues for example. But reporting signs that someone poses a risk of sexual harassment or abuse, and in all cases? And specifically, facing serious consequences if they do not? I would be surprised to say the least if this is already a standard part of a railway employment contract.
The subtext of this thread is that everyone thought you could basically trust the police. Until we realised to our horror that the underlying problem wasn't a few bad apples that the system had failed to detect and remove by some freak accident.
It was a pervasive culture within the force of not taking their duty of care seriously. Not appreciating that they serve us. And indeed even tolerating, maybe even encouraging, toxic masculinity in certain roles. It was certainly a culture of denial. There was no wider or systemic problem. How many times was that said by those whose literal job it was to know? Too many.
All that in a force with (I assume) the literal power to inspect any personal device a police officer might use to share their deplorable behaviour with colleagues without having to obtain a warrant, merely a reasonable suspicion that professional standards are being flouted.
It's lucky for the police there were so many other scandals and distracting world events going on at the time, because in any other era that would have been a defining and indelible stain on this country's psyche in the same way Hillsborough or the Miner's Strike has been
Not that those scandals seem to have improved police standards much in light of these more recent events. Although in those cases the official cover ups lasted decades, so maybe we're getting somewhere, albeit slowly.
We're already seeing a small scandal developing as people suddenly ask themselves, no doubt in light of the Horizon scandal, why the railway has such incredible power over us already. The power to ruin our careers and credit rating for offences that in other walks of life, are so triival as to ironically not even get a police officer out of their seat, never mind onto a typewriter.
Railway personnel are not police officers, but they are uniformed and they do occupy a position of some authority over the general public, even if it is wholly implied. The usual problems aside, there's still a pervasive culture of deference among the wider travelling public.
It is surely still the case that, because of some possibly misplaced sense of trust, nobody would question a unformed railway employee taking a young female passenger aside in the apparent course of railway business. Maybe they should?
Other than it being good practice all round, is there anything in the current HR manual that explicity says such things should always be conducted with witnesses and ideally under the gaze if CCTV? I don't know. I hope so.
Ironically it is arguably only the #MeToo movement, police scandals, and the general realisation that there is something deeply wrong with how this country balances trust and rights, that these days you're probably taking a big risk taking schoolgirl aside for a quiet word, because she's going to kick right off. So a predator naturally only targets the ones who look shy and weak.
Such people would indeed probably pass unnoticed among their colleagues, who would surely say such things never even happen on the railway. We already know many schoolgirls don't even bother reporting sexual assaults in school. Why would their commute be any different?
Blanket denial or attributing incidents to a few bad apples isn't going to cut it anymore. Only clear proof that there is no problem. Statistics that are actually challenged for their robustness, rather than an assumption that because it's data it must be an accurate picture.
Here are the specific reasons why are confident theres no problem. Here's what we do. Here's how we are proactive. Here's how we ensure we don't recruit the wrong kind of person for this role, and root out those who are already here, without being discrimatory or falling into long debunked stereotypes about the nature of abuse and abusers.
Don't underestimate the risk, I would say. I can't see anyone actually wanting to join the railway just for the chance to sexually assault young women passengers. But it can't have escaped anyone's notice that if that was your aim, even disregarding the DBS element, you'd surely find it far easier to join the railway than become a teacher or police officer, and there would be far more opportunities than other far more easily obtained roles.
It's perhaps time we had a second classification of position of trust, somewhere above bin man, but below teacher/police officer/clergy. Perhaps we already do, in the law, without it being specified at the level of individual roles? I genuinely don't know.
What definitely needs to end though, is the culture of being reactive rather than proactive. It doesn't work, and we've got a mountain of evidence to show it now. I suspect most people already know risk is a big factor for some when choosing not to travel on the railway. But perhaps they have always assumed staff only have a positive role to play there. Based on what, I wonder.
