Eleanor Holmes Norton: “I strongly support the Stop Sexual Assault and Harassment in Transportation Act, which would institute reporting…”

“I strongly support the Stop Sexual Assault and Harassment in Transportation Act, which would institute reporting requirements for incidents of sexual assault and harassment in passenger transportation carriers including airlines, vessels, buses, commuter and intercity passenger railroads, and transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft. I am pleased that this bill includes provisions that direct the Department of Transportation to collect information on the number of sexual assault and harassment incidents and to make that information publicly available, which Representative Rick Crawford and I included in our bipartisan AWARE Act. I believe that until we collect this information, the full magnitude of the problem will not be understood. We have heard some of it reported by my good friend just now from Oregon just now. In a 2018 survey of 2,000 flight attendants, one in five said they had been harassed, witnessed a passenger being sexually assaulted, or received a report of passenger-on-passenger sexual assault. Nearly 70 percent reported experiencing sexual harassment, and almost one in five reported being sexually assaulted by passengers. In fiscal year 2014, 38 instances of in-flight sexual assault were reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This number increased to 63 reported cases in 2017, but many instances of in-flight sexual assault remain unreported, because victims are fearful of contacting the authorities.…”