There is a beautiful mansion near my apartment which is on the National Historic Register. Built in 1900 for William Childs (developer of Bon Ami cleaning powders), it sits on the grand avenue of once-private residences directly across from the park. Now the mansion is home to the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture, a non-profit group hosting various programs and seminars. Not too long ago, they installed a banner out front stating that they are against torture. Did I miss something here?

Of course they are against torture. Who wouldn't be? Who is going to stand up and disagree with that? (No, actually I am all for torture.) Why restate the obvious? It's kind of like announcing you think Hitler was a bad man.

This leads me to the recent announcement by the MTA to let straphangers know that groping on the subway is wrong. Correctamundo, MTA! It seems safe to say that there are certain things we all know are wrong. Fondling your neighbor on the subway is one of them. But the MTA is spending a good bit of money rolling out a campaign to tell us this anyway. They want to encourage riders not to be afraid to speak up after a study showed that 63 percent of women have been sexually harassed on the subway. There will be a hotline to report such unpleasantness. But all good intentions aside, can this really even curb the problem?

A similar campaign on the Boston T resulted in an increase of reported incidents, which is to be expected, but there was no increase in apprehending the offenders. It all boils down to a he said/she said kind of thing. I mean, it's not like the guy leaves any fingerprints.

Full disclosure: I have only been groped on a particularly crowded section of Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras but never on the subway. As your faithful subway reporter, I took an informal poll. Only one friend had a tale to tell. She boarded the 2 train at 14th Street during the evening rush. Everyone was crowded and pushing their way in, kind of like the subway in Japan where the conductors will "help" you by using your body as leverage to squeeze more people on the train. (I suspect these women need the groping hotline more than anyone.)

My friend was subway surfing, where you don't have a pole to hang onto or a door to lean against — you're just riding the wave of the train. A heavyset, tall man was facing her. Every time the train jerked and lurched forward, she felt what she described as an elbow poking her. It was hard to tell exactly what — an elbow? Someone's backpack? — because the train was so crowded. She insisted I mention here that she was wearing a long coat which did its part to camouflage the offending poker. She started to get suspicious. Was it? Wasn't it? Then her apprehension was confirmed. The train stopped moving but the poking didn't. I asked if she would have called to report the incident if there were a hotline back then. She doubted it. "What good would it have done?"

Maybe hotlines like this aren't really meant to catch the wrongdoer but provide some false sense of security to the rest of the riders. We want to feel like something is being done. We insist upon action. Not doing something, anything, despite how ridiculously futile, is the equivalent of letting the offenders win. Reminds me of the random bag searches the local police conducted here after the London bombings. With seven million riders each day, what did they really expect to find in the backpack of Joe Commuter? But it made us feel better, even if just for a few moments.

Jacquelin Cangro