Uber recorded 998 sexual assault incidents in US in 2020, says report

Even though the pandemic decimated its ridership, ride-hailing platform Uber has recorded 998 sexual assault incidents, including 141 rapes, in the US in 2020.

Following a CNN investigation into sexual assault and abuse on the ride-hailing platform four years ago, the platform has released a 78-page report regarding safety incidents, which covers 2019 and 2020.

The company said it received 3,824 reports of the five most severe categories of sexual assault, which range from "non-consensual kissing of a non-sexual body part" to "non-consensual sexual penetration," or rape, reports CNN.

That is down from the 5,981 reports it recorded in 2017 and 2018, per its first report released in December 2019.

Uber said that riders were the accused party 43 per cent of the time in sexual assault incident reports, similar to its previous report (45 per cent).

Notably, Uber's total number of US trips over the two years fell to 2.1 billion down from 2.3 billion in the first report, and average trips fell from 3.1 million to 2.8 million per day.

The company noted that the rate of sexual assault reports decreased by 38 per cent from the first report to the second.

The 141 rape reports in 2020 mark a decline from 2019, in which it recorded 247 reports. During the same period, total trips in the United States fell to 650 million in 2020, from 1.4 billion trips in 2019, according to the report.

When it comes to rape reports, such incidents made up 0.00002 per cent of total trips.

About 91 per cent of the victims of rape were riders and about 7 per cent of the victims were drivers. Women made up 81 per cent of the victims while men comprised about 15 per cent (nearly double that of the first report).

--IANS

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