Norton Gets Commitment from Chair and Ranking Member of T&I Committee to Move Forward to Require Collection of Statistics on Sexual Assaults on Airplanes

WASHINGTON, DC – Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) today got a commitment from the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair, Bill Shuster (R-PA), and the Ranking Member, Nick Rahall (D-WV), to advance a provision to require the collection of data on sexual assaults that occur on airplanes, and therefore did not offer her bill, the “Protecting Airline Passengers from Sexual Assaults Act of 2014,” as an amendment to H.R. 4156, the Transparent Airfares Act, at the committee markup.

“I believe our bill will go forward,” said Norton. “A Republican Member has since introduced a similar bill and we have agreed to work together. I particularly thank Chairman Shuster and Ranking Member Rahall for working with me to advance what has become a bipartisan approach. I agreed not to offer my amendment for technical reasons related to its germaneness to the underlying bill, but the commitment from the Committee’s leadership to move forward to bring us a giant step closer to preventing these serious crimes. Without real-time statistics and documentation on sexual assaults on airplanes, which our bill requires, we cannot gain either the necessary information to prosecute these crimes or the insights to help eliminate them and improve complicated onboard sexual assault investigations by the FBI.”

Norton, a senior member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, introduced the bill last month, following news reports in February highlighting a surge in sexual assaults on commercial airplanes en route to Washington, D.C.-area airports and that there are no statistics of such assaults kept by any federal agency. Congressman Rick Crawford (R-AR) later introduced a similar bill to require the collection of statistics on sexual assaults onboard airplanes, and he and Norton have agreed to work together. Norton’s bill includes domestic and international flights that land in or depart from the U.S. Norton will also continue looking into how passengers can be informed of how to alert authorities if they have been assaulted.

Published: April 9, 2013