Uber has issued its second-ever safety report Thursday, noting 141 reports of rape in the U.S. on its ride-share service in 2020, a 38% decline from 2019.
The findings were published Thursday by CNN.
In its 79-page release, Uber received 3,824 reports of varying degrees of sexual assault, ranging from “non-consensual kissing of a non-sexual body part” to “non-consensual sexual penetration” or rape, CNN reported.
There were 20 fatalities as a result of physical assaults in 2019 and 2020, 15 of which were riders, according to Uber.
Uber trips in the U.S. fell to 2.1 billion from 2.3 billion in the initial 2017-2018 report released in December 2019, but that was a period that also included the mass nationwide COVID-19 lockdowns that impacted work commuting, closed entertainment locales and restaurants, forcing hundreds of millions to curtail their use on the ride-sharing service. There were 650 million fewer trips in 2020 than 2019, according to the report.
The accused party were riders, and not drivers, 43% of the time, which is a 2-point decline from the 45% in the first December 2019 review. Also, in the latest report, 91% of the victims were riders and 7% were drivers, Uber reported.
The total rate of rape reports per trip was 0.00002%, according to CNN analysis.
“The change in rate of sexual assault reports over time may have been impacted by a number of factors, including how the COVID-19 pandemic altered usage of the platform as well as Uber’s safety and transparency efforts,” Uber wrote in the report, according to CNN. “But each reported incident represents a harrowing lived experience for the survivor. Even one report is one report too many.”
Uber noted its 2018 implementation of continuous background checks were effective in reducing the dangers on the platform, reporting 80,000 drivers have been dropped from the platform to date.
Via Newsmax