SUNDAY Mail Chief of Staff Kate Kyriacou tells how she was indecently assaulted on a crowded Adelaide train - and nobody did a thing.

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I WAS indecently assaulted on a crowded train this week and nobody did a thing. And I'm angry.

It was not the first time I'd been threatened and abused. But it was the first time I've seen people turn around to see what was happening - then turn their back and stare at their feet.

I'd been on the 5.45pm train to Grange on Tuesday for about a minute when a man sat down opposite me and slumped in his seat.

He stretched out his legs and pressed them either side of mine.

Then he leaned forward and "accidentally" ran his fingers over my legs. He did it several times before leaning right down to apparently try and look up my skirt.

I was about to say something when he suddenly stood up and walked away.

A businessman sat down in the seat he'd vacated and when the man came back, he took a seat across the aisle next to another girl.

I was watching him as he stretched his legs out to press them against a woman sitting opposite him.

When she got off the train, he turned his attention back to the girl next to him. She was blonde and pretty, in her late 20s, and obviously uncomfortable.

He pushed against her until she was jammed between him and the window.

Then he put his arm around her and started touching her thighs. I saw her try and lean away, clearly upset.

A moment later he asked her for the time, pointed at her watch and leaned in to touch her chest.

I could see she was looking for escape, desperate to get free of the man who was pushing against her. So I picked my words carefully and made sure I used plenty of volume, knowing people would react once they realised she was being sexually harassed.

"Stop touching her," I told him. "Leave her alone. Keep your hands to yourself." People turned around - men turned around - to see who was making a commotion.

They looked at me, they looked at her and they looked at the man pressed up against her. And then they turned away. But I'd made him angry, and he got up and stood over me, telling me to "f... off". "I'm gonna kick your f...ing face in," he yelled. "I'm gonna stick my f...ing d... in your face."

He shoved his hands down his pants and stood over me to make sure I felt threatened. I wasn't quite sure what else to say that wouldn't further inflame the situation - and it was clear that nobody was coming to the aid of two girls being harassed and abused on the train - so I tried my best to stare him down until he went away. Eventually he did - stumbling down to the other end of the carriage to harass someone else. I didn't think he'd follow me off the train but I didn't want to take any chances so I called my housemate and asked him to pick me up.

"I'll explain when you get here. I don't want to go into it now," I said.

"No, I think I understand," he told me. Later he said he'd just assumed - correctly - that someone was harassing me on the train. I kept an eye on the man and was relieved when he got off two stops before me. The girl who had been pinned between a window and a drunken sex offender followed me to the door as I got off. She put her hand on my arm and said "thank you". "I really appreciate what you did," she said. "Not many people would have done that."

An hour earlier I would have disagreed. My housemate was waiting - as promised. I told him what had happened. Later I would tell some friends the same story.

"Weren't there any men on the train?" they asked. I thought that would be the end of it but the incident played on my mind all night. I kept thinking about the young girl who'd been on the Outer Harbor line last year when a man sexually assaulted her.

Later, her distraught father stared down the cameras outside the District Court demanding to know why nobody on that packed train had helped his 16-year-old daughter.

Now I want to ask the same thing. Why didn't anyone help the girl on the train? Why didn't anyone help me?

"You've got to report this to police," a colleague told me the next morning. "You don't realise it but you're traumatised and you're going to keep thinking about it until you report it."

So on Wednesday I spent two hours with the incredibly caring Senior Constable Gordon Scott, of the transit branch, who talked me through what had happened like an overprotective Dad. My colleague was right. I was much more upset than I'd realised.

But talking to the police helped. And hearing that the other girl had already made a report helped even more.

It's easy to sound off about the injustices of the world through the anonymity of the internet.

But when we see them happening right in front of us, we do nothing. We turn up our iPod and we stare out the window and we pretend we can't see a girl being groped on a train.

Maybe I was foolhardy, maybe I acted too impulsively - I'm glad I did.

Police yesterday charged a 31-year-old man from Adelaide with two counts of indecent assault.