Sleeping on planes used to be something of a superpower for Allison Dvaladze. Didn’t matter what time of day or how tired she was—once she was airborne, her eyelids started to droop. So on April 15, 2016, in hour four of nine on Delta Air Lines Flight 142 from Seattle to Amsterdam, she was doing her thing, dozing off while watching a “terribly depressing” Russian film. And then she says the man sitting to her left put his hand between her legs, and she was wide awake.

It was hard to process. As the director of global strategy, partnerships, and advocacy for two global breast oncology initiatives based at the University of Washington, Dvaladze estimates she’s on the road as much as 50 percent of the time between March and November. In fact, she takes this very flight on her way to Africa routinely. And yet, even as seats have narrowed and flight crews have shrunk, she never once imagined she’d have to be aware of her surroundings on a plane. “I’m not afraid to do things by myself or go to unusual places,” she said in an interview with Condé Nast Traveler. “But this was shocking.” As she remembers it, she yelled “No!” and hit the man’s hand away. He grabbed her again. She hit back again. After his hand shot toward her a third time, she managed to unbuckle her seatbelt and run to the back of the plane.

Rather than find comfort among the crew, though, Dvaladze only grew more agitated. After she described the assault, she says the flight attendants asked her what she’d like them to do. “What do you mean, what do I want you to do?” she remembers snapping back, incredulous. “I don’t know what you’re supposed to do.” They found her a new seat, about five rows away from her alleged assailant, but before moving her, Dvaladze says a crew member offered her a piece of advice that inadvertently set her on a nearly one-year mission: “Sometimes,” the flight attendant said in a comforting but resigned tone, “you just have to let these things roll off your back.”

No, Dvaladze thought, I’ve let these things roll off my back too many times.

Dealing with 'these situations'

Inflight sexual assault is a legal anomaly. Assault isn’t typically the domain of the feds, but because the FBI has jurisdiction over crimes committed in U.S. airspace, the bureau is responsible for investigating cases of “abusive sexual contact” on an airplane. It’s not a new phenomenon either; the Department of Justice formally recognized the offense in 1986. The general public’s awareness of it came three decades later, though, thanks to an October 2016 New York Times article in which a Manhattan woman came forward to accuse Donald Trump of groping her on a plane in in the early 1980s. He denied the allegation, but it did bring national attention to more recent cases that otherwise might have only garnered a spot on a cable news ticker.

There was Ricardo Caceres, who, on a Hawaiian Airlines flight from Honolulu to New York in January 2016, allegedly groped the man seated next to him and then took off his pants and began touching himself. Caceres pleaded guilty to simple assault four months later. In June 2016, Chad Camp repeatedly groped the legs and groin of a 13-year-old girl flying alone from Dallas to Portland on American Airlines. Camp signed a plea deal in January; now the girl’s parents are suing him and American. Then there was Wei-Ming Shi, who allegedly stuck his hand up the dress of a woman sleeping next to him on a Southwest Airlines flight from Las Vegas to Pittsburgh in August 2016. His case was still pending as of this month.