What do you do if you’re in a taxi and the driver keeps staring at you? What if a colleague keeps staring at your breasts? These are the sorts of harassment that can happen to women in general and female business travellers in particular. That’s why a risk consultancy is running women-only training in lone female travellers, Mark Rowe reported in the August 2018 print issue of Professional Security magazine. For full story, see that issue online.
Uber or not?
NGS (London-based Northcott Global Solutions) doesn’t deny that men can get harassed, that men as much as women are at risk when travelling, from assault and robbery and worse, and that their employers have a ‘duty of care’, to men and women alike. But the fact that the workshops have been taken up by some of the most familiar names in world business, would suggest that NGS have a point – and a market – for a gender-specific course. They do offer mixed, male and female traveller, training; and can do the course for a company internally. In that case NGS would look at the company’s policies and the profile of where the company is sending its travellers, in terms of risk. To go back to that taxi example. Does the company have a policy about whether its staff are allowed to use Uber cars?
As Anna-Liisa Tampuu, head of risk analysis at the London-based firm, points out, if a traveller copies a local and flags down a car, that makes it just a random person you are letting drive you around. That would put a man at risk as much as a woman – of robbery, say, or even kidnap – but the risk for a woman would be sexual assault. Hence the women-only workshops, where (with female trainers) women can talk about sensitive and confidential matters or experiences that they would not feel comfortable airing in front of men. Such as; what about contraception? What if you are travelling and you are pregnant? Which raises the employer’s medical coverage – does it have insurance, and does it cover evacuation. The workshop includes some self-defence scenarios; although it’s not a self-defence class.
Visit www.northcottglobalsolutions.com. See also the NGS advice on for LGBT+ travellers; pointing out that some some of the most problematic nations for such travellers are those in which the legal status of its LGBT+ citizens is unclear.
For more details and to register for workshops, contact NGS on [email protected].
About the company: NGS offers assistance services for business travellers, holiday-makers and expatriates; such as emergency response, whether medical or security, whether after flood or fire or man-made incidents requiring evacuation; co-ordinated at its 24-hour operations room in the City of London.
