Excessive alcohol consumption prior to boarding or in-flight can contribute to unruly behaviour which may present itself in the form of sexual assault
underneath her clothes. And in one incident, in June 2007, a female passenger reported the man sitting next to her penetrating her with his fingers whilst she slept.
So what makes such incidents particularly prevalent in-flight? Psychologist Susan Quilliam believes there are a variety of contributing factors. Although she says perpetrators probably have a “pre-existing disposition”, she also suggests “the aircraft experience means that that existing predisposition is triggered in a way that it might not be in other situations”.
First, Quilliam says, the anxiety of going on an aeroplane, and the fact that “people may get quite nervous beforehand, often days beforehand”, leads to perpetrators “feeling powerless in the situation” and “reaching out for comfort. So there’s not only a pre-existing disposition, but then there’s a trigger of a need for comfort and that can translate itself into a need for sexual comfort.” Of course this in no way excuses the decision to cross the boundary and act on that urge, but it might help to explain the prevalence of such behaviour in in-flight situations.
Next, Quilliam explains, the experience of taking a modern aeroplane flight is a unique situation in that “you’re with a group for a
December 2012 Aviationsecurityinternational
long period of time, but without any bonding opportunity”. Usually, she explains, “if we’re in a group, once we get ‘bonded’ to that group there is a social responsibility. If you’re with a group for any period of time and you bond then there’s much more likelihood that you will take responsibility for the group and you won’t abuse them”. In-flight however, “you’re not taking responsibility for other people, you’re only taking responsibility for yourself.”
“...you’re spending time with somebody doing intimate things like eating and sleeping, so there’s a facilitation of intimacy...”
Partly, she explains, this is due to the procedure of preparing to board a flight and the airport routine: “you’ve been taken through a process where you’re relieved of responsibility. You’re shifted through different spaces like the duty free and the area where you buy your food and then the corridors you go along, the waiting lounge, and you’re with other people but you’re actively encouraged to be just one person out of a group. You go through a lot of checkpoints where you are approved, you’re shunted through
on to the plane and told where to sit and told where to go. So you’re treated as almost a school group, where the responsibility is not yours, it’s in the hands of the uniform-wearing staff. But the fact that you haven’t been given a group bonding experience means that you not only haven’t got responsibility but you’re actively relieved of it – it’s literally ‘not my problem’. So this might cause a regression to an earlier stage of ‘I can do what I like’. You’re fed, you’re told where to sleep, they turn the lights out for you – everything is controlled, your day is controlled, your sleeping and waking is controlled in a way it probably wasn’t since before you could talk.” Quilliam also cites the unique sense of ‘non-space’ experienced in-flight – the feeling that you are in nobody’s jurisdiction, which can create a false sense of security for perpetrators. “You’re up in the air in a sealed container, flying, away from your own home, you’ve left somewhere, you haven’t arrived somewhere” – it is, she says, almost literally a case of “in space nobody can see you”.
It is also important, she stresses, to understand that the in-flight situation “lends itself to increased risk taking” and creates an artificial sense of intimacy, which might give some perpetrators a false sense of entitlement: “You’ve got a sense
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