Uber reports decrease in sexual assault incidents in latest safety report

Uber’s latest report on rider safety shows that instances of sexual assault are down.

CNN reported that the total number of sexual assault and abuse instances between 2019 and 2020 was 3,824 — a significant drop from the 5,981 that took place between 2017 and 2018 when the company released its first report in late 2019. 

According to CNN, Uber said that the rate of sexual assault reports decreased by 38% from the first report to the second.

Uber has five categories for sexual assaults, per CNN, ranging from “non-consensual kissing of a non-sexual body part” to “non-consensual sexual penetration,” or rape.

The outlet reported that Uber received 141 rape reports in 2020, down from 247 reports of the crime in 2019. CNN said that incidents of rape made up 0.00002% of total trips.  

Trips in the U.S. did fall by more than half in that time frame though. They went from 1.4 billion trips in 2019 to 650 million in 2020, according to CNN. 

A total of 2.1 billion rides were carried out in 2019 and 2020, which was down from the 2.3 billion rides Uber had for 2017 and 2018.

CNN reported that roughly 91% of the victims of rape were riders and about 7% of the victims were drivers. 

Women made up 81% of the victims while men comprised about 15%, which was double that of the first report, according to CNN

For all reports of sexual incidents, CNN reported that it was passengers who were the accused party 43% of the time. In the previous report, they were accused 45% of the time.

Uber cited the continuous background checks they instituted in 2018 as a positive way of checking for new criminal offense reports, according to CNN. The company said that this feature helped remove more than 80,000 drivers from its service.