CouchSurfing Ignores Harassment and Assault

Digital video artist Melissa Ulto went to Greece last month as a part of a European tour with a feminist performance group. To keep costs down, Ulto followed a friend's advice and connected with people on CouchSurfing, a website that links travelers to residents in different cities around the globe who agree to provide a place to stay and act as a resource to navigate the city ... for free. While a fantastic service in theory, Ulto quickly discovered that CouchSurfing has a disturbing downside. The second night she was in Athens, her host and his friends subjected her to verbal sexual overtures, homophobic harassment, frequent attempts to grope and kiss her, and frightening demands for sex. Fortunately, Ulto escaped the situation and moved to a hotel.

Shocked by what had happened, Ulto contacted CouchSurfing to report the host's misconduct and left negative feedback on his profile warning other women to stay away. The host retaliated by posting nasty comments to Ulto's profile, including calling her a "psycho." CouchSurfing remained silent. So, she contacted them again. Silence. On the third try, she threatened legal action and got their attention. But even that failed to keep it.

Safety Team Coordinator Rachel diCerbo wrote to Ulto, "Because we are not there to witness events, we rely on members to talk about their experience with one another through references ... we certainly empathize and will help people use the system in order to allow others to make informed decisions, but we simply must maintain as much neutrality as possible." In other words, without irrefutable evidence beyond he-said-she-said, CouchSurfing will not intervene or eject someone from their site to protect other users. (They did remove the host's retaliatory comments from Ulto's profile.)

One young woman from Hong Kong found out the hard way the failure of CouchSurfing's so-called safeguards fail to weed out sexual predators: she was raped and held captive by her CouchSurfing host last year while traveling in the United Kingdom.

Still, the online service ignores complaints from women and LGBTQ travelers who have been attacked, drugged, raped, molested, and harassed by hosts. (These complaints can be found on CouchSurfing's own message boards, and elsewhere around the Internet.) CouchSurfing denies responsibility with the pat response that victims should more vigorously vet potential hosts and report illegal behavior to the proper authorities in the country in which they're traveling. The onus for safety is on the victim, not CouchSurfing. But this manner of thinking ignores the way the system itself facilitates illegal behavior, or at least, does little to prevent CouchSurfing  from being used for nefarious purposes.

"Proof of legal action" is one way to convince CouchSurfing of your claim's merit, assuming you're in the city long enough and have the ability to find out who the proper legal authority is, lodge a complaint, get a copy of the complaint, and see the complaint through. This policy also assumes the legal authorities in a given city are able to adequately communicate with the victim (there may be linguistic and cultural barriers), that the authorities will take women and LGBTQ people's complaints seriously, and that they aren't corrupt. Considering all this, it seems like CouchSurfing's policy is pretty silly and ineffective, no? The point is not to have some policy; the point is to have effective policies.

The Member Disputes and Safety team is comprised of volunteers, and Rachel told Ulto they have had a "higher workload than usual" lately, which she claims is why the response to Ulto was delayed. But to my mind, she provided more warning signs that users' safety is not a priority. These types of issues warrant swift responses from actual staff members who have training and expertise in negotiating the complexities of victim's services and international law -- not people who are volunteering. And the increased workload report begs the questions: why is the volume of complaints so high and what exactly are the users' complaints about?

"CouchSurfing should be shut down," says Ulto. "It's a menace to women, and allowing sexual predators to continue to prey on them is irresponsible, especially in this economy, when young travelers are looking for cheaper accommodations." Harvard University agrees that the risk outweighs the benefit: it recently banned CouchSurfing guests in on-campus housing.

Tell CouchSurfing that sexual predators should not be allowed to use the site as a way to seek out their next victims.

Photo credit: thedailyenglishshow