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A few weeks ago, 20-year-old Ayla Mellek was taking a stroll along the Mile End canal when a man ran up and violently slammed his body into hers. She was knocked to the ground, narrowly missing the water and some broken glass on the path. Before Mellek could fully register what had happened, the man had darted off. She was left with a bruised hip and a swollen wrist. A 38-year-old man from Whitechapel has since been arrested on suspicion of common assault in relation to the incident.
Mellek's experience is certainly troubling — but even more worrying is the fact that she is far from alone in her experience of being assaulted and “slammed” into the ground by a stranger in the street. After Mellek took to TikTok to share her story, a number of other women shared similar accounts of being assaulted while out in public.
“This happened to me outside Old Street station a few months ago!” one person wrote. “I was waiting to cross the road and a man running body slammed me so hard I got knocked over backwards onto the CONCRETE.”
Another wrote, "Happened to me on the underground. A guy was running toward me, turned my body to let him pass and he bumps right into me. Full force. Damaged my shoulder. No apology."
“There was this one woman and she said she was pregnant and some guy just slammed her into the ground,” Mellek told the BBC. "But also it's reading all the comments online about other women and their experiences, how it's happened on the train, on the buses, just walking down the street in broad daylight."
One ad described a virtual boyfriend as “aggressively jealous” and a “kidnapper and killer”.
Other women also shared their stories with us. One anonymous woman says it happened to her in Peckham. “I moved to the edge of the pavement to create space for the man coming towards me to pass, and he slammed hard into my side.”
Another shares that she was knocked to the ground in Manor House. “He had tried to barge into me a few times before on different occasions but I’d managed to dodge him,” she says. “I just didn’t see him coming on the day it happened. He basically body slammed me across my shoulder and the left side of my body and it knocked me to the ground. I fell back onto a cobbled street and some women came to check if I was OK.”
Mellek's experience is, it seems, far from isolated. In fact, countless commenters suggested that it could have been an instance of butsukari otoko, a Japanese ‘trend’ that dates back to 2018, that is also known as “bumping man."
“Men, often dubbed butsukari otoko (literally, ‘men who bump’ or ‘bumping man’), purposely collide with women in public spaces: aggressively, silently and without warning,” says Arianna Masotti, clinical psychologist and founder of The Bloome Method. The trend, she says, has begun to spread from Japan to large cities like New York and London. The trend is commonly associated with misogynistic subcultures and self-identifying incels.
Andrea Simon, director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, notes, “Male violence against women and girls is nothing new, and these so-called trends are simply coordinated forms of harassment and violence against women facilitated by the rapid spread of misogyny online.”
It is, of course, disturbing. “As a clinical psychologist, I’m not just disturbed by the violence,” Masotti goes on. In her opinion, the trend stems from a particularly dark psychological belief — the belief that women don't deserve the space they occupy. "I’m struck by what this trend exposes: a deeper, systemic discomfort with women taking up space,” she says.
After her daughter, Brianna, was murdered by two fellow pupils, Esther Ghey became a campaigner for online safety.
The attacks stem from a misogynistic belief that women shouldn't take up space — particularly the same space — as their male counterparts. And, in turn, they are designed to make women feel humiliated to have tried to take up that space in the first place.
“These attacks reinforce something deep and dangerous,” she adds. “That female presence, especially physical presence, is a threat to be neutralised. It’s about power. And humiliation. It’s about reminding women, in a visceral way, that their bodies don’t belong in public."
She goes on, “When women are subject to public humiliation or physical aggression, it doesn’t just bruise the skin. It bruises identity. It tells them, on a nervous system level, ‘Shrink. Hide. Be smaller.’”
Not only does the ‘bumping man’ trend present very real, physical danger for women, it also represents the terrifying, but steady shift in the culture: a growing subculture is actively promoting not only the idea that women should be confined to certain spaces, but that random acts of violence against women will make men to feel better about themselves.
It all sounds a bit like The Handmaid's Tale — and it's yet another sign that we must take the rise of misogyny as seriously as we can.
“Men and boys are being served content that condones or promotes violence against women, even when they’re not looking for it, and we’re seeing mountains of evidence about its impact on attitudes and behaviours,” says Simon. “We need to see urgent action to prevent violence against women and girls by countering harmful attitudes and behaviours through education in schools and by holding accountable the tech companies profiting from misogyny and abuse.”
In the short term, what can women do if it happens to them? And what is being done to stop it?
The first step is to report it — even though it may feel pointless, it's important. A National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesperson says, “Women have the right to feel safe going about their daily lives and should not have to fear harassment or abuse. We would encourage anyone who believes they have been assaulted or harassed to report it to the police so we can take action and investigate.”
Experiencing this type of assault can also take a psychological toll, leaving women feeling unsafe and unstable in their own bodies.
“If you’ve experienced being ‘bumped’ or felt your safety shaken in public, know this,” says Bloome. “You are not crazy and that was not an accident. You are allowed to take up space — physically, emotionally, professionally. And you don’t need to shrink to feel safe. We need to change the culture, not our[selves].”
