A GLASGOW bartender has founded an organisation to ensure the safety of hospitality staff travelling home after late night shifts.

Rising to the challenge and motivated by her own first-hand experiences of harassment, Libby Dougall, a supervisor at the popular Glasgow bar and music venue, Bloc, has decided to take a stand against the unsafe working conditions that permeate the hospitality industry, by starting the Get Back organisation.

Talking about what motivated her to start the campaign, Dougall said: "It’s such a wide issue, I personally have lots of experience with harassment while coming home from work. In my job I finish at 4am and have a 15-minute walk home. Sauchiehall Street is a great example of the verbal harassment and intimidation that takes place on a nightly basis – people nipping at you and hollering at you in the street.

"For me, it all came to a head a couple of weeks ago when I was confronted by a couple of guys while on my way home after a finish. It started off as just verbal abuse but soon escalated into physical violence. While my injuries were just scrapes and bruises, this is something that happens so often to hospitality staff.’

Her pioneering initiative aims to assist employees who work in hospitality to get home safely from nightshifts that end after regular public transport is no longer available. Dougall conducted her own research into the fears and experiences of Glasgow’s hospitality workers and, after canvassing more than 90 bars and restaurants, she found that out of the hundreds of bar and hospitality staff consulted, 75 per cent feel unsafe while walking home.

"The issue is just so widespread," Dougall said. "What we intend to offer is a mobile app that employees and staff can use to facilitate safe travel, be it through massively subsidised, or even free, taxis."

Staff who work in late-night service jobs, particularly with bar work, are often more vulnerable to harassment when leaving their workplaces. For female staff especially, fears over sexual harassment are a constant threat.

Key findings undertaken by Zero Tolerance, a Scottish charity that aims to raise awareness of violence against women, found that more than 70 per cent of their respondents had experienced or witness sexual harassment, teasing or innuendo in their workplace.

A Unite Hospitality organiser said: "The hospitality industry is probably the most rife for sexual harassment. Our survey of hundreds of workers in the hospitality industry found that 92 per cent had experienced some form of sexual harassment from unwanted verbal to physical assault."

For many hospitality workers, the fear and intimidation does not stop at the end of their shift. It can be an even bigger problem as they are forced to make their own way home at night, many having to travel through a largely deserted and darkened city on foot. Hotel worker and student Lauren, who has often had to travel home in the early hours of the morning, said: "Verbal harassment happens often but it doesn’t even need to be blatant harassment to spook or scare me – like when a man tries to stop me in the street or asks me a question when I’m on my way home at night. I just put my head down, ignore them and speed up because I’m nervous and wary of what they are actually stopping me for."

Since its creation, Get Back has already hosted two well-attended charity gigs, and has succeeded in obtaining funding from Unite Hospitality, a campaigning organisation that aims to improve working conditions inside the hospitality industry.

Dougall plans for these funds to be spent on marketing her fledging organisation and on the development of the central app that allows hospitality staff to find verified, safe rides home with other staff in a design that Libby described as "Tinder meets Uber, but less sexy, more safety; safety is key".

Speaking with us about their involvement with Get Back, the Unite organiser said: "As part of the Safe Home campaign we are working with Libby’s Get Back initiative to ensure that workers are afforded better protection when they go home at night after a long shift.

"As part of our Fair Hospitality Charter, we will be putting pressure on employers to pay for taxis home for staff who are asked to work past midnight as well as implement a pro-active sexual harassment policy which seeks to prevent it from occurring rather than simply reacting once it has happened."

Although the creation of initiatives like Get Back are a positive step towards stopping violence against women, it is worth noting that the onus should not fall on women to found and facilitate campaigns to protect them from men’s violence.

Davy Thompson, campaign director for White Ribbon Scotland, a collaborative initiative that contributes to ending violence against women by making men more aware of the issue and of their role in preventing it, said: "Silence from one half of the population prevents change. We need the change in attitudes, particularly male attitudes, so that instead of asking, 'Why doesn't she make sure she gets home safely?', society starts asking, 'Why are men stopping her from getting home safely?'. One gender should not grow up having to fear the very presence of another."

Speaking about her thoughts on what steps need to be taken to ensure staff safety, hotel worker Lauren, said: "When you’re on minimum wage and very easily replaceable if you kick up a fuss or quit, it’s not likely that employers in the hospitality industry will do anything other than say goodbye at the end of the night and thank you for working the shift. They are more concerned about the venue being locked up and secure until the morning than they are of their staff getting home safely."

Dougall plans to hold more fundraising events for Get Back in the coming weeks and is looking into the possibility of hosting workshops to attract the people she believes the app would help the most.

You can follow Get Back on Instagram at: www.instagram.com/getbackglasgow/

For details of Unite’s Fair Hospitality campaign go to: www.fairhospitality.org/

The Sunday Herald is the media partner of the Write to End Violence Against Women campaign and awards organised by Zero Tolerance, which celebrate high-quality writing around the subject of violence against women. Jennifer Constable was awarded a bursary by Zero Tolerance to write a series of articles for this newspaper.

Submissions for the Write to End Violence Against Women Awards 2018 are now open. Find out more at: https://writetoendvaw.com/how-to-enter/