A recent report from the Guardian claims that a number of female drivers for Uber and Lyft have felt abandoned by the ride-sharing companies after reporting incidents of sexual harassment.
In an article titled “Female drivers feel abandoned by Uber and Lyft after reporting a sexual assault,” the Guardian details how many female drivers for ride-sharing services are claiming that they were ignored by their respective companies when reporting issues of sexual harassment and assault.
The article describes the experience of one female driver, writing:
The propositions escalated from offering to pay for sexual favors to insisting on bringing her back to his apartment. “He said we could do it in the car, I said no again. Then he stuck his hand in my shirt, I was pushing him away from me, he grabbed my thighs and front area.”
A passerby caused the rider to briefly stop, and Dukes quickly unbuckled her seat belt and jumped out of her car, causing the rider to flee. She immediately called the police, and the rider was arrested and issued a restraining order after continuing to harass her on social media. When she reported the incident to Lyft, they offered no assistance other than deactivating the rider’s account.
“Someone emailed me and told me they suspended him from using their platform and that was it,” Dukes added. She hasn’t driven for Lyft since the incident.
An investigation by the Guardian alleges that there have been numerous cases similar to her’s, and that Uber and Lyft have failed to act on nearly all of them:
“The issue here is: how are the companies taking responsibility for these issues? They’re not protecting passengers well and they’re not protecting drivers well,” said Nicole Moore, a Lyft driver in Los Angeles, California, and organizer with Rideshare Drivers United-LA.
Drivers have noted that picking up passengers can be dangerous as users of Uber and Lyft are not subject to the same background checks as drivers are. In one instance, this resulted in a female Uber driver named Terri Beilke being threatened at gunpoint to drive around with a man as he performed errands. Another driver was assaulted by a female passenger and alleges she received no support from Uber:
In San Diego, Terri Beilke, a Lyft driver, had a rider bring a gun into her car on 11 May who then tried to coerce her into driving him around town to do errands. But because a rider purchased the ride for someone else, who brought in the extra passenger with a gun, she didn’t know who to identify to the police.
“This is a common practice for an account holder to do something nice for a friend or stranger even … and by that you’re putting the driver in jeopardy,” Beilke said.
She called the police after the rider left her car, but she was told they couldn’t do anything because there was no way to identify him. It took Lyft five days for someone to contact her from their critical response safety line.
Read the full report from The Guardian here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com