Rape in Truck Driver Training is not Gender Specific

Thorpe Steele is a Truck Driver who was arrested at the St. George, Utah Port of Entry in early 2018 by diligent commercial motor vehicle enforcement officers who ran his Commercial Driver's License number and found there was a warrant for his arrest that had originally been filed October 2017. Thorpe raped a brand-new female student at C.R. England.

Thorpe Steele

She reported it immediately to the company and to law enforcement.

However, Thorpe was able to trot about 5 miles down the road and get a verification of employment (VOE) to start driving for Watkins-Shepard, which was another training fleet where he could continue to have access to student truck drivers.

Thorpe Steele requested female trainees according to court documents and C.R. England knew about his history of sexual assault. His history included the assault of a co-worker while he was a school bus driver in Texas. Jury returns verdict in trial of trucker accused of raping trainee | Local News | stgeorgeutah.com

Thorpe got 5 years in prison for the crime he committed at C.R. England but that was over 5 years ago. He's very likely out now.

Right now, the American Trucking Association is promoting a program to reintroduce the formerly incarcerated into society by getting them into truck driving jobs and it is very likely Thorpe Steele will find someone willing to hire him in order to get the associated tax credit for doing so.

Let's be clear, there are a lot of formerly incarcerated individuals that have turned their life around by becoming a professional commercial driver and we support giving everyone a chance to do just that. However, sexual predators do not change their ways.

The trucking industry would like accolades for helping the formerly incarcerated get a second chance but since they have worked to create a low barrier to entry in trucking, that have no ties to retention metrics for any taxpayer funded commercial driver license training program and there are no mechanisms in place to track sex offenders to protect the public, this program is just another government money grab by the usual suspects.

Most people do not report rape because they are ashamed and scared. Trucking companies often discourage drivers who have been sexually assaulted to make a police report in order to keep the issue swept under the rug. As "over the road" drivers, we travel through many different states in a day. This presents a jurisdiction issue. Law enforcement may be unwilling or unsure how to take a police report. That means most sex offenders who are CDL holders are free to travel state to state anonymously and to work in training fleets where they can thrive as trainer, co-driver, lease purchase and "leased on" operators. Truck driver training at some of the worst companies requires co-habitation with another person as a requirement for employment unsupervised for weeks and months at a time. They call this "training", but it is actually a scheme to get the least experienced underpaid student drivers to do the most dangerous work, "team diving" and usually with a person they do not know.

To protect the public, sex offenders are supposed to be registered where they are living, they are not supposed to be near schools or parks. What happens when they decide to become "over the road" truck drivers? How does the American Trucking Association and the Women in Trucking Association propose to address this when their corporate sponsors are some of the ones where the most sexual assault occur during training?

Ironically, many of these same carriers are corporate sponsors of "Truckers Against Trafficking" that aims to educate truck drivers to be the eyes and ears on America's Highways to spot human trafficking and report it. How can we expect truck drivers to take this seriously when the trucking industry cannot even look at itself in the mirror? It's all related! Human trafficking, sex trafficking, labor trafficking, sexual assault and sexual harassment in truck driver training, unsafe training, exploiting labor, targeting easily exploitable demographics to enter truck driver training with no retention metrics, employer driver debt bondage from tuition and early indoctrination of lease purchase truck leases, misclassifying workers, blacklisting, wage theft. All of this leads to unnecessary truck crashes and fatalities of innocent people. Stop letting these big lobby group associations run the show!

Will Thorpe Steele and others like him get their next job at a trucking company, or at a school district? Same gender training does not fix this issue since same gender murders and assaults are also frequent. The FBI has linked long-haul truck drivers to serial killers. This problem is not going away by eliminating a study being conducted by a qualified research team and replacing it with garbage data that the American Trucking Association (ATA), The American Trucking Research Institute (ATRI) or the Women in Trucking (WIT) Association have influenced.