A petition for compartments for women only on Berlin’s public transport network has received more than 15,000 signatures in just nine days.
The signatories appealed to the State-owned Berlin Transport Company (BVG) to designate areas on trains, trams and buses just for so-called “Flintas”, a progressive German acronym encompassing women, lesbians and trans people.
The petition was launched on April 14 by Alex Born, a self-described feminist punk-rock musician, after she witnessed a man covertly photographing a girl on a metro train.
In an interview with public broadcaster RBB, Born described how she confronted the man and forced him to delete the image of the girl’s anatomy from his phone.
Born later posted a video of the incident on social network Instagram and recounted how she had been a victim of similar abuse herself: “Someone rubbed up against me, stood behind me, groped me,” she told RBB.
The petitioners suggested establishing the special compartments using purple seats in the rear areas of vehicles “where abusive men often sit”.
A BVG spokesperson insisted current safety measures were sufficient, adding: “If you need help you can always talk directly to our employees using the emergency call points.”
The petition echoed a call from the Greens party in Berlin to establish separate areas for women on public transport. That followed a highly publicised alleged rape case in which a man was accused of abuse and violating a woman onboard a moving subway carriage in February 2024.
Sexual offences have risen on Berlin’s public transport network, as data from the BVG’s annual security report show.
In 2014, 68 cases of sexual offences were reported but that figure had more than quadrupled to 313 cases in 2023.
According to Berlin police, some of that increase was due to the tightening of sexual offences laws in 2017 and 2021.
Case numbers have since also increased.
Beatrix von Storch, deputy chairman of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the German parliament, blamed the rise on unchecked immigration. “That’s what happens when you bring the Middle East to Germany,” she wrote on X on April 23.
“At the beginning, the left-wing Greens promise us a ‘colourful’ society and in the end we have gender segregation like in Iran and Saudi Arabia.”
Separate compartments or carriages for women are provided on the metro systems of Cairo, Riyadh, Dubai and Tehran.
