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Discovery

Unwanted touch

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.31.2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 October 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Claudia Hammond explores unwanted touch and who we do and don’t mind touching us – and where. She draws on insights from the largest study that’s ever been conducted on the topic of touch – The Touch Test - commissioned by Wellcome Collection. Almost forty thousand people from all over the world chose to take part. Claudia discusses where we draw the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable touch, at work or in the street, with Dr Amy Kavanagh, a visually impaired activist and campaigner, Joanna Bourke, Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London and the author of “Rape - a History”, and Dr Natalie Bowling, a psychologist at the University of Greenwich who co-created the Touch Test and has been crunching the numbers. After #meToo and Covid, could unwanted touch even become a thing of the past?

Transcript

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0:23.4

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0:28.3

Newscast, listen on BBC Sounds.

0:32.3

This is Discovery anatomy of touch from the BBC. I'm Claudia Hammond and today we're talking

0:38.0

about unwanted touch and who we do and don't mind touching us and where.

0:43.2

You never really know what's going to happen,

0:45.1

so it's very difficult to describe a typical journey,

0:47.8

but my commute to work is about an hour and ten minutes.

0:52.0

It's a combination of walking, train, bus. There are many kind of

0:56.2

points of interaction where somebody might touch me. I'm visually impaired, I can't see two meters away. So I would be walking to the tube in my local area, which is quite quiet. Normally the start of the morning is fairly peaceful but pretty much from walking into the tube station

1:19.2

that's when the interactions can start. It can be anything from being sort of dragged down a set of

1:27.5

stairs or pulled onto a train pushed into a seat.

1:34.0

Another place it happens very regularly

1:36.0

is when I'm waiting to cross a road in a busy area.

1:40.3

I plan routes specifically so that I can cross at points that are safe and that are familiar.

1:47.0

So I'll aim to use a pedestrian crossing, for example, where there's a button and noise beeping. But when I'm there focusing and

1:56.4

concentrating waiting to cross a road, it's quite normal for someone to, without warning,

2:02.1

without saying anything, to grab my arm and pull me across the

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