Superbus discriminated against a high school student and her friends in Beit Shemesh, and now must pay for it, an Israeli court has reportedly ruled.
Israeli Bus Company Forced To Pay Damages For Gender Segregation
Superbus discriminated against a high school student and her friends in Beit Shemesh, and now must pay for it, an Israeli court has reportedly ruled.
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
An Israeli bus company will pay a 15-year-old girl $3,200 after one of its drivers told her to sit in the back of the bus, Ynet reported today.
Ariella Marsden and two of her friends were coming home after school when they got on the bus and sat down in the front section.
Shortly after, two haredi men boarded and stood at the front, opting not to take empty seats in the rear.
The driver asked Marsden and her two friends to move to the back to make room for the haredi men. The three friends did so . But by then there weren’t three open seats in the rear section, and all three students were forced to stand while the two haredi men took seats.
The driver did nothing to correct the situation he caused.
The Small Claims Court of the Israeli city of Beit Shemesh, a hotbed of haredi violence against women and illegal forced gender segregation, ruled that the Superbus driver was responsible and ordered the company to pay damages to Marsden.
"This was a very insulting incident that flustered me at the time. I feel that I have gone through a change and from now on I will sit wherever I want, without letting anyone interrupt me. I don’t plan on fighting over every incident of women's exclusion. I have said enough. I will only fight for the important things," Marsden told Ynet.
The ruling is viewed as groundbreaking because it holds a company responsible for the behavior of its employees and attaches a monetary cost to the company for that behavior.
During the past year, haredim in Beit Shemesh have stoned women they deemed to be immodestly dressed, stone a woman and her 7-month-old baby for the same reason, and screamed at, chased and spat on 7-, 8-, 9-, 10-, and 11-year-old girls, calling them “whores” and “shiksas,” a derogatory term for non-Jewish women. They have also tried to illegally enforce public gender segregation on sidewalks and in stores.
This is apparently the first time any company or individual has been made to pay a financial price for enabling illegal discrimination against women.