Mimi Yates tested the safety of women by going incognito on the Tube. Men followed her, groped her, and disregarded her cries to stop within hours. It was bone-chilling, according to her.
At around 2 am on the Piccadilly Line, the tube carriage was empty, apart from her and a man twice her age. She said his eyes never left me during the whole 40-minute journey.
She said he was potbellied with a menacing grin, and then he moved suddenly from the seat opposite, plonking himself down next to her, talking to her over the deafening noise of the train.
She got off before her stop because she was uncomfortable, but he followed her to another almost empty train that was travelling towards Stratford on the Jubilee Line. He kept trying to talk to her while licking his lips and looking at her.
She eventually managed to lose him somewhere between the platform and the escalators at North Greenwich station.
She’s on the platform at Green Park thirty minutes later when a different man calls out to her in an attempt to get her attention. Wearing stylish spectacles and a Barbour-style jacket, he invites her to take a seat next to him as they wait for the train.
‘Beauty needs a seat, now. Come sit down,’ he says. Mimi tentatively takes up a place with two seats between them. He tells her he has a daughter who is her age.
He keeps asking Mimi where she lives and, after failing to get an answer, starts threatening her. ‘I will find the pub or restaurant next door to you. I’m going to come to look for you, and I will find you.’
He doesn’t give up, repeatedly demanding her phone number. She tells him politely ‘no’ 20 times – she counted.
She boards the train she’s been waiting for. Laughing, he follows her into the same carriage, sitting down opposite me as he continues to ask for her number. It’s about 3 am now, and the carriage is busy, but that doesn’t deter him.
‘You have to give me your number, you have to. I am asking for yours. You have to meet up with me.’
Then he reaches over and strokes my thigh. ‘Please don’t touch me,’ She hears herself say.
A girl and her partner see what’s happening but say and do nothing.
By the time Mimi gets home, it’s almost 5 am. She is badly shaken and films her reaction on her phone. ‘My heart is still beating quite fast. I just don’t think I expected it to be that bad.’
This wasn’t a normal night out. She had been working undercover for the Daily Mail’s investigative series, Underground UK.
Over two months this year, she trekked across London’s transport network at all hours of the day and night, secretly filming what happened to her and documenting how it felt to move around the capital as a young woman on her own.
What she experienced has changed the way she views the city she loves.
In March this year, a London Assembly report described ‘unacceptable’ levels of violence against women and girls across the capital’s public transport network.
In 2025, 4,593 sex-based offences against women and girls were recorded, yet only a small proportion, about 3 per cent, led to a charge or summons.
Some 58 per cent of cases identified no suspect at all, despite an expansive network of CCTV and ticketing data that can help trace journeys.
Recent cases show why. In May, Salman Yousaf, 46, was imprisoned for eight sexual assaults and one count of outraging public decency on the Night Tube.
He preyed on lone ladies who had fallen asleep on the Central and Jubilee Lines, but it wasn’t until he was incarcerated for another crime that authorities linked him to the attacks.
In March, Craig Anderson, 38, was imprisoned after sexually assaulting four women and stalking another across the railway network. Prosecutors portrayed him as a man who ‘did not take no for an answer’.
If someone is staring at you, tell them to stop; if they don’t stop, yell at them. If they touch you, hit them. I know that won’t work in every case, but it will work, especially if there is a crowd. Everyone – we need to intervene and help others, and since the police are ineffective in these situations, some women have even begun carrying telescopic batons.
But this is nothing new; even 40-odd years ago it was like this, and it was depressingly normal to be sexually assaulted on crowded tube trains. I myself have had someone’s hand up my skirt on a crowded train, and there was nothing I could do about it, apart from scream out, ‘What pervert has got their hand up my skirt?’ Everybody on the train looked the other way, and quite frankly, tasers need to be legalised for women and girls to carry.
Of course, it’s not every man, but there are an unfortunate number of men who seem to believe they have the right to molest anyone who fits into their sexual imaginings, but really, they are sad, inadequate men, and nothing more.
This has nothing to do with politics. This is just an unacceptable age-old practice where men prey on women, but people still victim-blame, saying that women shouldn’t be out so late, but what actually needs to happen is that predatory men need to be held to account.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 