On a flight from Dar es Salaam to Johannesburg recently I sat near a young Muslim woman who was swathed in a black chador. As we got ready to disembark, her beautiful, expressive eyes smiled at me through the cloth obscuring her face. We had reached the end of a four-and-a-half-hour journey; I was making the long trip home to Sydney, she was headed for who-knows-where.
We were separated by passengers jostling to exit the aircraft and so weren't able to converse, but I got the sense that she was preparing to meet someone she hadn't seen in a while, that she was excited to be making this journey. I also wondered what it must be like for someone so overtly Islamic to travel on a plane surrounded by people who have learned to equate Muslims with terrorism.
Perhaps I was being overly sensitive on this young woman's behalf, for no-one was behaving aggressively towards her. But one never knows what ideas might be populating the minds of the people in one's midst.
Such as the notion that since men have a greater propensity to commit acts of paedophilia than do women, children travelling unaccompanied on planes should be removed from their sphere as a precaution against mid-air sexual assault. This was the opinion expressed by columnist Tracey Spicer in the Sydney Morning Herald's Traveller section on the weekend.
In the article, provocatively titled 'I don't want my kids sitting next to a man on a plane', Spicer asserts that while 'almost 90 per cent of child sexual abuse is committed by someone in, or known to, the family ... stranger danger is a risk and women are perpetrators in only about 8 per cent of cases'. Moreover, a ten-year-old girl was molested by a man on a flight from Kansas to Detroit more than a decade ago.
Men, Spicer deduces, pose more of a risk to children than do women. It must therefore be correct to assume that women are safer travelling companions for unaccompanied children, and airlines should comply with demands for such protocols to be implemented.
Except that in-flight sexual assault — just like abductions or hijackings — is so unlikely that to suspect all those people who bear some of the markers of past perpetrators (reclusiveness, religious persuasion, gender) is to manufacture a hysteria that is almost as morally reprehensible as the hypothetical offenses themselves.
For feminists who have fought for generations