News & Advice

The Unfriendly Skies: Why Sexual Assault Still Plagues Air Travel

Allison Dvaladze thought her airplane seat was a safe space—until she says she was groped on a flight to Amsterdam. Whose job is it to police harassment when you're 30,000 feet in the air?
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Sleeping on planes used to be something of a superpower for Allison Dvaladze. Didn’t matter what time of day or how tired she was—once she was airborne, her eyelids started to droop. So on April 15, 2016, in hour four of nine on Delta Air Lines Flight 142 from Seattle to Amsterdam, she was doing her thing, dozing off while watching a “terribly depressing” Russian film. And then she says the man sitting to her left put his hand between her legs, and she was wide awake.

It was hard to process. As the director of global strategy, partnerships, and advocacy for two global breast oncology initiatives based at the University of Washington, Dvaladze estimates she’s on the road as much as 50 percent of the time between March and November. In fact, she takes this very flight on her way to Africa routinely. And yet, even as seats have narrowed and flight crews have shrunk, she never once imagined she’d have to be aware of her surroundings on a plane. “I’m not afraid to do things by myself or go to unusual places,” she said in an interview with Condé Nast Traveler. “But this was shocking.” As she remembers it, she yelled “No!” and hit the man’s hand away. He grabbed her again. She hit back again. After his hand shot toward her a third time, she managed to unbuckle her seatbelt and run to the back of the plane.

Rather than find comfort among the crew, though, Dvaladze only grew more agitated. After she described the assault, she says the flight attendants asked her what she’d like them to do. “What do you mean, what do I want you to do?” she remembers snapping back, incredulous. “I don’t know what you’re supposed to do.” They found her a new seat, about five rows away from her alleged assailant, but before moving her, Dvaladze says a crew member offered her a piece of advice that inadvertently set her on a nearly one-year mission: “Sometimes,” the flight attendant said in a comforting but resigned tone, “you just have to let these things roll off your back.”

No, Dvaladze thought, I’ve let these things roll off my back too many times.

Dealing with 'these situations'

Inflight sexual assault is a legal anomaly. Assault isn’t typically the domain of the feds, but because the FBI has jurisdiction over crimes committed in U.S. airspace, the bureau is responsible for investigating cases of “abusive sexual contact” on an airplane. It’s not a new phenomenon either; the Department of Justice formally recognized the offense in 1986. The general public’s awareness of it came three decades later, though, thanks to an October 2016 New York Times article in which a Manhattan woman came forward to accuse Donald Trump of groping her on a plane in in the early 1980s. He denied the allegation, but it did bring national attention to more recent cases that otherwise might have only garnered a spot on a cable news ticker.

There was Ricardo Caceres, who, on a Hawaiian Airlines flight from Honolulu to New York in January 2016, allegedly groped the man seated next to him and then took off his pants and began touching himself. Caceres pleaded guilty to simple assault four months later. In June 2016, Chad Camp repeatedly groped the legs and groin of a 13-year-old girl flying alone from Dallas to Portland on American Airlines. Camp signed a plea deal in January; now the girl’s parents are suing him and American. Then there was Wei-Ming Shi, who allegedly stuck his hand up the dress of a woman sleeping next to him on a Southwest Airlines flight from Las Vegas to Pittsburgh in August 2016. His case was still pending as of this month.

“We’ve never had any reason to believe this wasn’t happening,” says Laura Palumbo, the communications director for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. “But we didn’t start getting regular requests for information on the topic until the past year.”

Dvaladze didn’t know any of that early last summer when she started researching the phenomenon. For that matter, she had trouble finding much of anything on the topic, so one of her first requests went to Delta: “I would like to know what your protocol is for dealing with this type of situation,” she wrote to a customer care specialist in June in the course of filing a complaint with the company.

As far as she was concerned, it was clear the airline had no protocol for addressing allegations of sexual assault. As she remembered it, the flight attendants, though sympathetic, asked her what to do. They found another passenger to switch seats with her for the duration of the flight, though she says before landing they asked her to return to her seat—next to her alleged assailant—because that passenger wanted his seat back. (She refused.) But perhaps worst of all, Dvaladze found out later, the crew had failed to radio ahead to authorities on the ground, allowing the man to slip away into Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. In fact, the airline representative left her with the impression that it was her responsibility to report the incident to local police. Delta was, however, happy to offer her 10,000 SkyMiles as “a gesture of apology.” (A Delta spokesperson said she could not comment on a specific customer’s experience, but would say that Delta contacted authorities in Dvaladze’s case—although she didn’t specify who.)

The thinking goes, no one wants to take the lead on such an issue and risk being perceived as 'the sexual assault airline.'

Ideally, says an FBI spokesperson, crews would notify the bureau directly of sexual assault allegations; Joint Terrorism Task Force or airport liaison agents are typically available on-site. But given the confusing jurisdictional anomalies of U.S. airspace, allegations may end up with a police or sheriff’s department in the flight’s city of destination, through which the victim—or assailant—may only be passing.

Dvaladze’s description of her experience doesn’t surprise Sara Nelson. She’s the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, has more than two decades’ experience as a flight attendant, and says the membership is in dire need of training. She says the union has received a steady stream of calls from members describing sexual assaults on planes in the nearly seven years she’s been in leadership, and yet her attempts to persuade the airlines to train their employees to respond specifically to these incidents have gone unanswered. “Typically we’ve found that in any situation where the airlines are asked to address something unpleasant, they’re reticent to do so,” Nelson says. The thinking goes, no one wants to take the lead on such an issue and risk being perceived as “the sexual assault airline.”

Last fall, having received no help from the airlines, the AFA began meeting with sexual violence advocacy groups and fast-tracked a training program for its members. However, that program was abruptly shelved after the presidential election. Nelson says that in the current conservative political environment, the union has had to reevaluate where to devote its resources.

Condé Nast Traveler contacted six airlines for this story: Alaska, American, Delta, Hawaiian, Southwest, and United. Only Hawaiian’s spokesperson referred to sexual assault by name when responding to questions about the airline’s protocol for addressing these incidents inflight. He did not, however, specifically say that Hawaiian offers training for sexual assault situations, only a “range of different scenarios.” Spokespeople for Alaska, American, Delta, Southwest, and United say that those airlines train flight attendants to address “inappropriate touching and assault,” “misconduct,” “harassment,” “inappropriate passenger behavior,” and “these situations,” respectively. And while all but United—whose spokesperson would not discuss specifics—report that company policy dictates crew alert authorities on the ground in the event of an incident, none specified federal authorities. The Federal Aviation Administration, for what it’s worth, makes no requirements related to training or reporting.

Why isn’t it enough that flight attendants and crew are prepared to respond to assault in general? Because, says Nelson, one passenger punching another over an invasion of personal space and a man surreptitiously groping a woman are two different animals. The former is public and attracts witnesses. The latter is covert and often becomes a case of he-said-she-said. But the problem may be even simpler than that. “Because the airlines haven’t identified this as a potential issue, there is a segment of flight attendants who aren’t even aware that it could be happening,” she says.

When the numbers don't add up

Dvaladze is a numbers person. Her work involves helping hospitals in developing countries set up breast cancer control programs. “Data allows you to gauge both your ability to manage a situation and the impact of your intervention,” she says.

Yet as she found last summer, numbers related to inflight sexual assault are difficult to come by. An FBI spokesperson says the agency investigated 57 such cases in 2016, up from 40 the previous year. However, the Department of Justice, which oversees nearly a hundred federal judicial districts across the United States, doesn’t track how many of those investigations led to prosecutions—much less convictions.

The most significant factor skewing those numbers, though, is likely that the majority of sexual assaults of any kind go unreported. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that 68 percent of victims simply choose not to come forward. And why should they, reasons Kristen Houser, chief public affairs officer at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, when so often victims are ignored, derided, and blamed for their own victimization? “We minimize sexual violence in our culture all the time,” she says. “So when that is the standard, we see victims minimize what happens to them.”

Dvaladze says she had no luck resolving the issue with Delta and instead reported it to the FBI. According to her, the investigation was still open as of late February. She has had some success on a macro level, though. As she dove into her research, she launched a Facebook page, Protect Airline Passengers from Sexual Assault, as a clearinghouse for what little data and information she could find. Then last summer she met with the staff of Senator Patty Murray, of the state of Washington, and recounted her experience both on the plane and in the months since. On October 31, Murray and Senator Bob Casey, of Pennsylvania, sent a letter to the FAA and the DOJ to request they convene a working group that would explore ways to better track and address the issue. Twenty-one other senators signed the letter. And in late January, they received a response: The agencies were already working on a solution.

That tangle of red tape is a slow, clumsy response to a problem Dvaladze thinks could be addressed—at least in part—by a simple announcement at the beginning of each flight: “There is no smoking in the lavatory, and we have a zero tolerance policy regarding the harassment of other passengers.” But it’s a start, and she’s far from finished. “My next plan is to write a really nice letter to Alaska: ‘I think you guys are awesome. You could be leaders on this,’” Dvaladze says. “If there’s a problem, I’ll find it and try to fix it. I don’t give up easily.”