The New York Times
May 20, 2011
Sexual Affronts Are a Known Hotel Hazard
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
A lot of people were shocked by the charges that the head of the International Monetary Fund sexually assaulted a hotel housekeeper in New York last weekend.
But housekeepers and hotel security experts say that housekeepers have long had to deal with various sexual affronts from male guests, including explicit comments, groping, guests who expose themselves and even attempted rape.
“These problems happen with some regularity,” said Anthony Roman, chief executive of Roman & Associates, a Long Island company that advises hotels on security matters. “They’re not rare, but they’re not common either.”
Hotels are reluctant to discuss such incidents, but security experts say the accusations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the I.M.F. chief, will prompt some hotel managers to review their security practices to better protect their housekeeping staff.
Zemina Cuturic, a refugee from Bosnia who works at the Tremont Chicago Hotel, said she remained frightened whenever she had to clean Room 410 because of what happened there a year ago. She was vacuuming, she said, and the guest, who had left the room minutes earlier, suddenly reappeared and “reached to try to kiss me behind my ear.”
“I dropped my vacuum, and then he grabbed my body at the waist, and he was holding me close,” Ms. Cuturic recalled. She persuaded the guest to let her go, and she fled. “It was very scary,” she said. Ms. Cuturic reported the incident to hotel management, but decided against going to the police. “I was kind of scared that he’d come back the next day if I did,” she said.
A Tremont official said the hotel, part of the Starwood chain, has a full-time security guard whose only job is to watch over the housekeeping staff. In the incident that Ms. Cuturic described, the official said that management confronted the man and insisted that he leave the hotel.
Housekeepers, nearly all of whom are women, talk of guests who offer them $100 or $200 for sex, apparently thinking that the maids, often low-paid immigrants, are desperate to earn more money. Some women complain of episodes in which they were bending over to, say, clean a bathtub, and a guest sneaked up and stuck his hand up their skirt.
Tom Whitlatch, president of Risk Services, a security consulting firm, said many hotel companies were taking a new look at safety after the accusations against Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who has resigned from the I.M.F. to focus on fighting the charges against him.
“I can assure you that the big hotel chains are aware of this incident and are saying, ‘We need to make sure our housekeepers are trained about this and we’re doing enough to prevent things like this from happening,’ ” he said.
Mr. Whitlatch said that there was little that hotels could do to prevent some of the incidents, but that training and good security procedures could reduce the risks to housekeepers.
Kathryn Carrington, a retired housekeeper who worked 30 years at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, recalled several occasions when she went into a room to clean, only to have a male guest emerge from the shower in his bathrobe, which then suddenly opened.
In one case, she said, a guest propositioned her, saying, “I see a pretty dark girl. Can you do something for me?” Ms. Carrington acknowledged that she used to carry a can opener with her in case she ever needed to defend herself from a guest.
The Grand Hyatt’s management was very supportive, she said. “They’d tell you, ‘If any situation occurred, get to the nearest phone and call the supervisor and leave the room. Someone else will help you do the room,’ ” she said.
The Hyatt Corporation declined an interview request, but said in a statement, “The safety and security of guests and associates is one of our top concerns.” It noted that its hotels employed many security measures and safety protocols. “Any time an associate raises a concern, we take it very seriously, promptly investigate the situation and follow as appropriate,” the company said.
Andria Babbington, a union safety official and a former room attendant at a major Toronto hotel, said at least five guests exposed themselves to her during her 17 years in housekeeping. She remembers once having to deliver a bathrobe to a guest who had called for one. “I knocked on the door. He said, ‘Come in,’ and I saw the guest had no clothes on,” she said. “He asked whether I could touch a certain part of his body.”
Some safety experts recommend that hotels send a male employee to deliver bathrobes or blankets when guests call for them, although they say that even male hotel workers are occasionally grabbed or propositioned by female guests.
There is also debate about whether an open or closed door is safer for a housekeeper cleaning a room.
Mr. Whitlatch recommends that housekeepers keep the door closed, saying that makes it harder for an outsider to enter to attack them or to steal the guest’s belongings. If the guest enters with a key, he said, the housekeeper should return later to finish the room.
But some maids disagreed, saying an open door can discourage a guest from misbehaving because another guest might be walking by outside.
“Keeping it wide open is the best option,” Ms. Babbington said. “When the door is shut, no one knows you’re inside.”
Ms. Carrington, the retired Grand Hyatt housekeeper, said the smartest approach was to keep the door open with the cart wedged in the doorway. “If someone comes into the room, they have to move the cart, and you hear it,” she said.
The Embassy Suites hotel in Irvine, Calif., mandates closed doors during cleaning — a policy that bothers Argelia Rico, a housekeeper there. She recalled an incident in 2009 when she was cleaning a bathroom and the guest walked in. “He asked me to change the sheets, and he went to the living room,” she said. “I was bending over tucking in the sheets, and suddenly he had come up right behind me. He was naked.”
She said the man lay down on the bed, aroused, and asked her to leave. “I was very scared because he could have just locked the door and raped me,” she said.
Christopher Daly, a spokesman for HEI Hotels & Resorts, which manages the hotel in Irvine, said it had no record of such an incident. “If any such activity, including sexual assault, was brought to our attention, we at the hotel would contact authorities ourselves, whether or not the employee asked us to or was planning to file charges,” he said.
Guests are not the only threat to housekeepers. Police in the Washington area suspect that a still-unidentified attacker raped seven housekeepers in a series of incidents several years ago.
Housekeepers and officials with the main hotel workers union, Unite Here, said that housekeepers were often too embarrassed or scared to report incidents to management or the police. Sometimes they fear that management, often embracing the motto “the customer is always right,” will believe the customer over the housekeeper and that the worker may end up getting fired.
Ms. Babbington said a co-worker once encountered a naked guest who chased her around the room. “She was just panicking,” Ms. Babbington said. “She was very new in the country and she demanded to talk to the police. Her manager sat her down to calm her down and told her not to call the police, that it wouldn’t be good for the hotel.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/21/business/21housekeeper.html
