If you’ve traveled on the New York City subway, you’ve likely heard the warning from the automated system: “If you see something, say something.” But most New Yorkers know that one of the cardinal rules of the city is to mind your own business.
There’s a lot of energy in the city and not all of it is good. So in the interest of safety, keep your eyes averted and your mouth shut. But when one woman witnessed not one but two children being abused on the subway, she decided to speak out.
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A mother was berating her teen daughter for something she did with a water bottle.
This story made its way online when another passenger saw the confrontation, recorded it, and posted some of it on TikTok. In the video, where you only see the expressions of other weary commuters, you hear the mother and the woman who intervened going back and forth.
“The problem is you didn’t see what she was doing with the f—ing water bottle, so mind your f—ing business,” the mother shouts in the clip. The child advocate responds, “You sat up here for over 20 minutes berating a little f—ing girl. Talk to her. You don’t have to berate her on the f—ing train.”
When the mother says she corrected the behavior on the train because that’s where it started, the woman who intervened says, “Then teach her! Everything is a learning lesson.”
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The woman who defended the girl explained in a TikTok of her own that another woman also was hitting a toddler on the train.
Once the original video was posted, people wanted to know more about what happened and the identity of the brave woman who decided to defend the children. Afterward, the woman, whose name is Toya, came forward with her own storytime video on TikTok, explaining exactly what happened and why she decided to say something.
It wasn’t the child with the water bottle at first. There was another mother whose child, a toddler, had fallen on the train. In response, the toddler’s mother punched the child in the back of her head with a closed fist and wearing large rings.
Toya explained that she couldn't take it: “It was seeing that lady punch her child in the back of the head that sent me over the edge,” she said. “I was like, ‘Ma’am you cannot hit your child like that. You cannot do that.”
'I was disgusted with her,' Toya said about the mother of the teenager.
That’s when the other mother, the woman who was berating her teenage daughter, likely motivated by a guilty conscience, spoke up, telling Toya to mind her business. Toya tried to tell the mother of the teen that this didn’t concern her.
“I was disgusted with her. Don’t get me wrong – her berating her child had me in tears,” Toya says. “But the lady hitting that toddler in the head sent me into rage. Honestly, the lady that hit the toddler wasn’t able to get schooled the way she needed to because loud mouth wanted to make it all about her.”
TikTokers were encouraged by what Toya did.
Toya said she had a personal connection to being an abused child and could relate to both of the children on the train that day.
“Being the child that was mentally, emotionally and physically abused, it’s like I saw myself in both those children and I just decided to be the adult that I needed as a child,” she says, concluding the video.
People in the comments section of her TikTok commended her for doing what most wouldn’t.
“Never stop using your voice,” one person wrote. “You are amazing!”
