On Wed, 7 May 2008 20:38:08 +0100, Les Invalides
wrote:
>>I have little doubt that on average there is a greater risk of a male
>>committing a .ual assault than a female. Therefore a woman taxi
>>driver presents less risk to a lone passenger than a man. But what is
>>also true is that the risk of being assaulted by *any* taxi driver is
>>very small indeed - sufficiently small that there is no need to take
>>steps to reduce it further.
>The London authorities (TFL etc) would disagree with you here. For
>several years they have been running various campaigns to persuade lone
>women not to travel with male cabbies, and also to introduce a stricter
>regime around who can work as a minicab driver. Their theory seems to be
>a variant of the Great Paedophile Conspiracy; namely, that rapists are
>specially drawn to work as taxi drivers, because it gives them
>opportunities to .; and therefore special measures have to be taken
>to exclude them from it.
I would need to see statistics showing a large number of such crimes
before being anywhere near convinced that the risk is significant
enough that it merits measures being taken to reduce it.
Apart from anything else, ISTM that a cabbie would be relatively easy
to trace, and so even if a cabbie were to *want* to assault their
passenger I should think that the high probability of being caught
would be sufficient deterrant.
--
Cynic
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