“Let’s not close ourselves a priori”: Orrego does not rule out a proposal against harassment with exclusive cars for women in the Metro

After taking place these days, an educational campaign against harassment in public transport -where several complaints have been made in different parts of Santiago-, the proposal to implement exclusive wagons for women in the Metro was raised again.Within the meetings that were given regarding the campaign, the governor of the Metropolitan region, Claudio Orrego, explained to Bío Bío that the corresponding actors of the police, ministries, student leaders and representatives of the Metro and Transantiago participated in the meeting. In this instance, the proposal to divide some wagons by gender was addressed.
“I think you have to study it,” Orrego said. “You cannot close a priori to something that the same student leaders, the spokeswoman of the Confech, are raising because they feel insecure,” he said.
Orrego said that an educational campaign against sexual harassment in transport could require a cultural change that could take years to become an effective solution to this issue, and in between the authority wondered what measures they could adopt.
Since for her part, the Minister of Women, Antonia Orellana, was against the idea, since in her opinion, this measure normalizes harassment. However, Orrego refuted that there are many women who feel unsafe in the Metro and invited the company and the minister to “evaluate it, to see the evidence of what has happened in Japan, India, in Mexico and in Brazil.”
“Clearly we have to do a campaign to change the culture, in addition there is a new harassment law that establishes prison sentences and fines, but the question is what we do in the meantime (…) A voluntary alternative can be created, because we are not proposing mandatory segregation,” he added.
In that line, he assured that it is not a measure that “threatens freedom and that it is not something that normalizes harassment, rather it makes it visible.”
He insisted that the campaign against harassment in public transport seeks to make it visible and raise awareness, “I ask the authorities not to close ourselves a priori, discuss, put the evidence. If the problems are more than the goodness, let’s not do it, but let’s not close the debate before,” he reiterated.

Original source in Spanish