A Melbourne woman is calling for road rage to be taken more seriously as an offence after a man stalked and intimidated her for 10 minutes while she was driving to pick her son up from school.
Sarah Haar was trying to change lanes as she took an exit from the Citylink freeway to a road in Melbourne’s inner north to get to a petrol station when a car nearby accelerated to prevent her from getting in.
Haar told the ABC that the driver, a man, beeped his horn aggressively and then began following her.
Feeling anxious because she didn’t feel safe stopping to refuel her car with him there, and didn’t want to lead the man to her son’s school either, she took a turn and kept driving — only for him to stay behind her.
“I just did every manoeuvre I could think of to get away, tried to change lanes, he changed lanes behind me, turned on to the side streets, he followed me,” she said, per ABC
“The EPA is a really good example. So the Act allows public citizens to file a report for littering, or for smoky cars for cigarette butts flicked out of a car,” she told the ABC.
“I think something like that, that could be used to report, road rage, or aggressive behaviour on the road would be really, really useful for police to be able to then follow up.
“But at the moment, what we have is a system that doesn’t really address this at all.”
According to the ABC, a 2005 Victorian parliamentary inquiry actually did recommend the Department of Justice establish a road violence hotline, among dozens of other recommendations.
Victoria’s Crime Stoppers does have a Hoon Hotline, where residents can report speeding, burn outs and other hoon behaviour, but there’s still no dedicated service to report road rage.
Hopefully Haar’s experience can change that.
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She said the man “started pointing towards my car, picked up these two white latex gloves” and “slowly and theatrically put those on his hands”.
He then made hand gestures that she felt looked like choking mentions, leaving her terrified for her life.
Panicked, Haar called triple zero, which is around the time she lost him.
Still, she went to Brunswick police station and tried to report the incident, but was told there was no offence to report. Police wouldn’t even give her an incident report number to show her workplace why she had been late in arriving.
It’s here that Haar learned that while assault, dangerous driving, tailgating and property damage are crimes, road rage like she experienced is not.
But despite that, Haar said road rage can still be really “threatening” and make people “fearful” on the road, and said there was a gap where people couldn’t really do anything about it.
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