This research takes a sociological look at sexual assault on airplanes, and why there seems to be a higher rate of reporting. Sexual assault is of high interest in the field of sociology, but there seems to be a gap in the data about those incidents that take place on airplanes. We used 80 news articles from the years 2000-2020 to gather data on sexual assaults that took place aboard an aircraft, and used variables that are used in the National Incident-Based Reporting System, such as offender, victim, and crime characteristics. Upon collection of the data, we observed that there seemed to be a high number of reports of the incidents, despite the fact that most sexual assaults go unreported. 71 out of 80 cases were reported to law enforcement (88.7%), which is far higher than the 23% average reporting rate that the National Crime Victimization Survey had from 2010-2016. I investigated possible sociological causes for this possible increase in reporting, including the public nature of flying, the increased supervision from the close vicinity of passengers, and the fact that most of the perpetrators in these cases were strangers to the victim. The perpetrator being a stranger is one of the indicators of higher reporting generally among sexual assault victims, so the fact that most of the perpetrators in these news stories were strangers was significant for our findings. Getting hands on research experience is essential in moving forward to graduate school, as I now know what the process looks like and what to expect from it. In addition, I plan on going into social work, so this experience has been very relevant to my career in that I will surely encounter someone in my field who has experienced sexual assault, and this has given me an insight into the reasons that people do (or don’t) report sexual assault.
Author: Sami Hausserman
Faculty Advisor: Kristen Budd, Department of Sociology and Gerontology
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