Uber revealed that 5,981 sexual assaults were reported by users or drivers of its service, as well as by third parties, in the United States in 2017 and 2018, in a security report released Thursday (December 5th).
For the year 2018 alone, the VTC group recorded 235 rapes (or "Non-consensual sexual penetration") against 229 the previous year. Over these two years, 92% of the victims were users. The report also reports 280 attempted rapes in 2018, up from 307 a year earlier.
The other assaults are divided into different categories of touching or attempts to touch or penetrate sexual or non-sexual areas. The company says that Uber drivers are not always the aggressors.
"These incidents were reported on 0.00002% of the races. Although rare, each of these reports represents a person who shared a very painful experience. Even a single report would be a report of too much ", says the global giant of the VTC.
This is the first time that Uber has published this report – which is 84 pages long – while the company and its main American rival, Lyft, are under increasing pressure in the face of growing complaints from abused users.
Complaints also against the competitor Lyft
On Wednesday, twenty women filed a lawsuit in San Francisco, California against Lyft for sexual assault or rape that occurred in chauffeur-driven vehicles affiliated with the California company. They are in addition to fourteen similar complaints filed in September.
Accurate figures on the number of lawsuits filed are not known, but lawsuits have led the two companies to put in place various measures to better ensure the safety of passengers.
Uber and Lyft have made identity theft more difficult for drivers. They also tightened controls to detect criminals and added a button to report a problem during the trip.
Features that victims' lawyers see as essentially ineffective. They advocate the systematic registration of races so that drivers feel under surveillance, greater cooperation with authorities in the event of an incident, and better checks of drivers' past.
Uber's report also reveals that 107 people lost their lives as a result of road accidents in 2017 and 2018, during trips ordered on its application. In addition, nineteen people were killed in assaults related to Uber trips over two years: eight passengers, seven drivers and four people outside.
