Liz Goodman and her daughter were in a busy train carriage when a male passenger began to leer and make suggestive remarks. How does she explain sexual harassment to a child who is just emerging into the adult world?

My 13-year-old daughter and I went to see Jane Eyre at the National Theatre on the South Bank, a few weeks ago. It was a clear night and we walked across the bridge to catch the tube, talking about the play as we went. Jane Eyre’s strong sense of justice comes across early in this exciting production, along with her independent will and ability to make clear choices in a world where women were expected to behave in particular, passive, conformist ways.

It was pretty late when we boarded the train, and the carriage was almost full of other theatregoers on their way home. My daughter was sitting on my right and the only free seat was on my left. After a couple of stops, a man got on. It was hard to tell, but he was probably in his 30s. He cast his eyes around the carriage before declaring, quite loudly, that someone would have to move. “I want to sit opposite her,” he said, staring at my daughter.

I could feel her physically recoil beside me, hardly able to believe that he was talking about her. She looked at me wide-eyed and didn’t speak, but grabbed my hand with her smaller sweaty one. I reassured her that it was OK. “There’s a seat next to me,” I told him.

No one else in the carriage spoke or even looked at us. He sat down very close next to me and proceeded to stare across at my daughter, craning to see round me. “What’s your name?” he asked. She didn’t reply.

“Pretty, pretty, pretty,” he said.

I told him quite clearly that she did not wish to speak to him and that I would like him to stop. Again, no one else said or did anything to help or support us.

For me, this was a first. The first time I had been out with my newly teenage daughter when she was sexually harassed. I felt ashamed about not knowing whether she had already been subjected to something like this before, when I was not with her, and I felt nervous to ask – she looked so fearful.

I also felt a sense of responsibility or fault. She had been late home from school, rushing to get changed and, as we left the house, I had grabbed a tailored jacket for her. It belonged to me and she wore it over a short, navy H&M dress, with socks and Doc Marten shoes. Her legs were bare. Maybe I should have taken a moment and insisted she wore tights? Or a longer skirt? Or trousers? So, already I was experiencing feelings of guilt and shame, and the harassment was not even aimed at me.

The incident also felt threatening and isolating. By now, we were four or five stops from our destination and my daughter had hold of my hand very tightly. I told the man we were going to move, but he got up himself and moved further down the carriage as a couple of seats had become vacant.

Now other passengers started to look up at us, one offering a tiny smile. Although the man had moved away, my daughter seemed to feel no safer and asked if we could leave the train before our stop and walk the rest of the way home, but we didn’t.

So we were both, in our own ways, caught in a position of feeling the need to alter our behaviour, either in practical ways, or through the internal dialogue with which we are saddled every day. Girls should dress differently. Or put up with the inconvenience of changing their travel plans. All in order to suit a culture that makes women feel bad about their own choices.

I don’t experience much sexual harassment these days. I think I have reached the life phase of those invisible middle-aged, slightly greying women, who secretly, shamefully, wish for just one more cat-call to make them feel they are still desirable. At the same time, my irregular and unpredictable menstrual cycle (I’m not even sure you can call it a cycle any more) reminds me irritatingly that I am losing any utilitarian function, all while I am telling myself – indeed shouting at myself – that I am much more than a receptacle for generating life. It is a contradictory, sometimes lonely, place to be.

My child, however, is just entering this life phase. I wonder how I can help her to navigate a world in which she may feel threatened by some men. It is a difficult conversation to have and I am not even sure that my help is of any use.

I want to tell my daughter that men are wonderful, supportive, as full of complexities and joy and love as women are. I am sure she knows this anyway. But I also see that she is beginning to experience alternative ways of imagining men – menacing ways.

On the short walk back to our house, she asked what I thought she should have done if I had not been there. Go and ask another adult for help, came my stock response. “But what if I had been older?” she asked, “Like a grown up.”

I said that I thought she should not feel intimidated by that kind of behaviour and that she could politely ask him to stop, or move away herself, to sit near someone with whom she might feel safer. But in the end, you do what you do. I don’t know how she will feel or react when faced with a similar situation if I am not there. I am not even sure how I would react if it were to happen again when we are together. I already regretted suggesting he sit next to me and even now retell myself the story with a different response. There is only so much preparation you can imagine or envisage before it is there, in your face, threatening your very self. Politely asking someone to stop behaving in a threatening way may be a placatory act just as much as it may be an incendiary one.

When I told a male acquaintance about what had happened, he asked if I had told the man that my daughter was 13. I had not and began to wonder why. I think, on reflection, it is partly because that is personal information and I wanted him to know as little about her as possible.

But also partly because, whether you are 13, 18 or 47, sexual harassment is never OK. Somehow, if I had declared her age, it would almost have been saying that it would have been more acceptable in five years’ time. And it would not have been. I don’t have any clear or easy answers to these sorts of questions, other than to reinforce the point that neither my daughter, nor anyone else’s daughters, should have to feel fearful or ashamed of their bodies, and neither should they have to change their behaviour to avoid these feelings of shame.

In the end, then, I look to one of my own heroines, Jane Eyre, who probably had it about right in her response to Mr Rochester when he tries to tame and control her, and mould her into what he thinks he wants her to be.

“I am no bird and no net ensnares me,” she says. “I am a free human being with an independent will.”

Liz Goodman is a pseudonym