Last year, around this time, I spent some weeks speaking with workers and bosses in what is often called the gig economy. There was—and there is still—an idea that working self-determined hours on contract, rather than holding a full-time job, is the future of American employment. The model interested me because it had intense support from the progressive Brain Trust, even though its socioeconomic effects were vexed. I came to realize that, somewhere along the way, the idea of democratic empowerment had got tangled up with the notion of self-defined living, and what had once freed people to drop out and lose a Tuesday with the Grateful Dead, against the strictures of the Man, was now freeing companies such as Uber to hire them at variable wages with few guardrails, let alone health care.

As I followed my interview schedule around New York, from coffee shop to hipper coffee shop and then to various lovely Airbnb-bookable lofts, the workers I met from the 1099 economy (1099, because the money arrives piecemeal, rather than through W-2 employment) spoke often about making do with limited recourse. Full-time employees at companies, after all, have fallbacks for dire circumstances. Collective bargaining is an option. Human-resources departments are meant to address discrimination and harassment—as are federal laws. Freelancers exist outside that sphere. They are accountable but not accounted for. They can fall victim to the whims, iniquities, and weird ideas of whoever happens to be paying for their work.

I thought about the 1099ers again this autumn, as sexual misconduct led the news. To the extent that comprehensive data about workplace harassment exist—which they only sort of do, given issues with reporting—it has emerged as a problem of mustard-gas pervasiveness. A study, in 2016, by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s workplace-harassment task force, suggested that a minimum of one-quarter of women report having experienced workplace harassment, and allowed that it might be as much as eighty-five per cent. (Two other surveys’ findings fall within that window, respectively fixing the proportion at forty and sixty per cent of women. Men report, too, but at lower percentages.) The prevalence varies with different kinds of workplaces, running high in, for example, service industries and low-wage jobs. That may be partly because employees in these roles tend to have little job security: they’re easily replaced.

By that logic, freelance workers are highly vulnerable. They have little institutional support and few, if any, supervisors. They are transient and easily replaceable as well. Those who gig with algorithmic ratings systems must stay on the good side of capricious clients. Others, who depend on word-of-mouth referrals, are obliged to embrace any gift horses that come.

Individual horror stories have emerged—at times, there seems a nearly inexhaustible supply. But it’s also tricky to find numbers here, due to a dearth of data on freelancing as a sector. The Bureau of Labor Statistics gathered information on contingent and alternative-employment workers from 1995 to 2005 (before the explosion of gigging apps), and then stopped. Tom Perez, the last Obama-era Secretary of Labor, refunded that survey, and new data were collected last May. So far, though, they’ve gone unreleased. In the absence of basic information, comprehensive sexual-harassment statistics among freelancers seem a lot to hope for—even as they’re urgently required.

Slowly, and in drips, though, data are trickling in. This afternoon, HoneyBook, a platform for freelance events-industry workers—photographers, caterers, stationery designers, and so forth—released results from a sexual-harassment survey it ran, in December, among users. The sample is limited, and hardly random. (The company sent a survey invitation to thirty-eight thousand of its users; a thousand and eighty-seven participated anonymously, and ninety-seven per cent were women.) But it’s not nothing, and the data start to light a candle in a room that has been dark.

The harassment numbers in the HoneyBook report are—one wishes this were a shock—high. Fifty-four per cent of the freelancer respondents reported being sexually harassed in the course of their work. Of those, seventy-seven per cent cited “unprofessional comments” about their appearance, three-quarters were called “demeaning nicknames” on the job, and a horrifying sixty per cent reported physical intimidation. Eighty-seven per cent never brought these incidents to anyone’s attention, even though eighteen per cent say they were harassed by the same person more than four times. (More than eighty per cent, in fact, continued working on whatever the harassment-filled project had been.) Those who did lodge complaints found their claims ignored more than half of the time.

Taken as a glimpse of a much larger picture, these numbers are alarming not only for the widespread problem they suggest but as an indication of how far outside a basic accountability structure the supposed future of work stands. HoneyBook recommends that freelancers add anti-harassment clauses into their contracts. (A majority of their survey participants included no language.) Other advisers suggest keeping thorough records of encounters and pursuing legal action if reporting doesn’t yield results. The counsel, though sound, only underscores an imbalance: in freelance projects, even more than in the normal workplace, the burden of time, effort, risk, and even method for resolving harassment rests on its victims. The costs of freelancing are, in more than the literal sense, the costs of self-support.

In my magazine piece about the gig economy, I traced the long path of progressivism from a systems-building philosophy, a century ago, to what I called a “politics of the particular”: an ideal of customized life styles, self-expressive endeavor, and distrust of large systems. (Progressivism is not the only belief system to have curved in this direction.) That route is freeing, in many ways, but riskier and lonely, too. Support has not increased to cover opportunity. Some stresses of the workplace, rather than melting, have grown. Tracking them—not just in individual accounts but systemically, through the working world—is crucial: we can’t fix what we don’t see, and we can’t protect what we do not see whole. A wide survey isn’t as heroic as a woman of uncommon courage, but heroism shouldn’t be a standard of protection. Freelancers do enough to keep their candles burning. It’s time for companies like HoneyBook to light the room by gathering—and publishing—harassment information on their own.