Working the Night Shift, Alone and Vulnerable to Sexual Assault

They clean your offices, your hotels, your malls and airports. But as everyone else goes home, janitors — many of them undocumented women who work the night shift — are alone, which makes them especially vulnerable to sexual assault and rape.

In Rape on the Night Shift, premiering tonight on PBS, FRONTLINE joins forces with Univision, KQED, the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting to investigate the sexual violence that many of these women face.

Ahead of the documentary’s broadcast premiere, KQED’s Central Valley bureau chief, Sasha Khokha, is out with a three-part radio series on how the story has played out in California.

In Part 1 of the investigation, Khokha looks into what happened when ABM, the nation’s largest janitorial employer, was sued by 21 women for allegedly failing to protect them from sexual harassment and assault by 14 men working for the company. In Part 2, she looks at what the government is doing to prevent janitors from getting raped. In Part 3, we meet some former janitors who have gone undercover to clean up abuses.

You can listen to the entire series below. And you can watch Rape on the Night Shift starting tonight at 10 p.m. EST both on-air or online. (Check local listings here).