A report from a federal investigation has found that female employees working for Grand Canyon National Park suffered frequent sexual harassment from three male boat operators for more than a decade, according to Reuters. Male employees are said to have propositioned female coworkers for sex as well, touched them inappropriately without consent repeatedly and made unsavory comments.
River trips seemed to be the main setting of the abuses as they could last for weeks at a time, and until recently staff were permitted to bring alcohol with them, according to the Associated Press. A human resources official working at the park was quoted in the report as describing a "laissez faire" culture of "what happens on the river stays on the river," according to the Associated Press.
The report was released on Tuesday by the Department of the Interior's Office of Inspector General, following an investigation that was prompted by 13 current and former Grand Canyon employees filing a complaint in 2014 complaining of the long-term abuse that they and other women had allegedly suffered, according to CBS News.
It shows a number of incidents in which sexual misconduct has been punished, including through termination of employees, but concludes that the response to sexual harassment is so inconsistent that women generally refrain from reporting it in the first place, according to the Associated Press.
One of the women involved in the 2014 complaint pointed to alcohol as a major factor in the harassment and sexual violence and praised the Park Service's acknowledgement of the problem in banning alcohol from the trips, according to the Associated Press.
"It was a culture of victim-blaming perpetuated by all levels of management," she said in an email, according to the Associated Press. "I repeatedly sat in meetings in which victims who had reported sexual violence were degraded and discredited."
Two of the men implicated are no longer working for the park, with the third boatman claiming that while he had consensual sex with women while on river trips, he was not one of those disciplined for incidents in the report, according to Reuters. He is no longer allowed to participate in boat trips.
