What could be more normal in a digital society than to have food delivered? Home delivery services are becoming more and more common in Luxembourg. But this raises security issues, as deliverymen have access to the telephone numbers and addresses of their customers. Three women tell the Journal about the day they feared for their safety.
Séverine will remember for a long time this fast food order. In 2018, while babysitting a friend's two-year-old child at home, she ordered her dinner at a fast-food restaurant and used a platform to have her food delivered. The delivery man arrived, she went downstairs with the child to collect her order, and there followed a "simple exchange of courtesies where he complimented the child", but nothing more. Séverine went back upstairs and the evening went on as normal.
It was only the following day that she received a request for a message on Facebook. She immediately recognised the previous day's delivery man from his profile picture. He mentioned "you and your child" and explained that he would like to get to know her better. Séverine did not follow up on this message. But it was not meant to be the last one. "I read the request but I didn't accept it, he had no way of knowing if I had read the message or not. I chose to ignore it but he didn't stop there, he insisted, calling me back no less than four times, always with messages", explains the young woman, now 34 years old. She chose to continue ignoring his solicitations. But the spurned delivery man did not stop at messages. Three days later, Séverine left her house to go to the gym… and came face to face with the delivery man who was waiting for her. "I live above a commercial building, so there is no doorbell for my flat. I don't know how long he had been waiting for me, but there he was! Surprised, she didn't even have time to be afraid and calmly but firmly told him that she was not interested. "I had to pretend I was in a relationship to get rid of him, fortunately he didn't insist and just left", she continues.
It was when she told people about this bad experience that she realised that things could have turned out differently. "I was so surprised that I didn't realise that the consequences could have been quite different, that this guy could have continued his harassment", especially as Séverine had already been followed for several weeks by an older man when she was only 16. He had obtained her details through his work at the bank and had even broken into her home, fortunately in the presence of her parents. The police were not helpful at the time: "My father called the police. The officers downplayed what was happening to me, saying it was just a jilted lover, that I wasn't going to ruin his life by pressing charges." Therefore, she does not trust the authorities to press charges against the delivery man: "It would be useless", she concludes.
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