(Re)thinking safety: (Infra)structural micro-spatio-temporalities of young women's victimisation on public transport in Singapore

Despite decades of literature from various disciplines that have ascertained that women experience higher anxieties relating to sexual violence in public spaces, including public transport, recent scholarly works have called out the continual exclusion of marginal voices, such as women's lived experiences, in planning and policy-making. In addition to the gendered nature of sexual crime (i.e., female victimisation), women's experiences are also further trivialised due to underreporting. While some research acknowledged that oversights in spatial design can exacerbate the severity of victimisation, there exists little research that addresses how sexual violence as a social injustice manifests spatially, particularly through lived realities. This paper seeks to further explore the intersections of the sociality, spatiality, and temporalities of micro-mobilities within public transport, and aims to address the above research gap in transport and mobility justice, and situates individual lived experiences (i.e., sexual harassment) with the broader materiality (i.e., public transport design) and cultural norms (i.e., trivialisation of women's experiences due to patriarchy). Drawing on qualitative methodology that includes 21 semi-structured, in-depth interviews conducted with female undergraduate students in Singapore, and borrowing the concepts of socio-spatial dialectics (Soja, 1980) and body-as-(infra)structure (Woods, 2024), I critically examine the lived experiences and (micro)mobilities on public transport (i.e., MRT trains, buses, and transit areas), and situate them in the broader socio-spatial constructions of gendered safety. This paper aims to contribute to the burgeoning research on gendered experiences, mobilities, and mobility justice, using a micro-scalar, feminist, and urban geographical perspective to examine where and how sexual assault happens, as well as the reluctance in reporting sexual offences.