Hope Hicks was a 19-year-old cadet aboard a U.S.-flagged
car carrier vessel in the Red Sea when she says a group of senior officers
pressured her to take repeated shots of liquor and one of them followed her
back to her cabin and raped her.Hicks, who was training to be an engineer at
the time of the 2019 incident, says she woke up to find blood on her sheets and
bruises on her body.
The Coast Guard later charged a senior
engineer with sexual assault. But all charges against him were dropped after he
voluntarily surrendered his merchant mariner license last year.
Allegations of sexual assault on ships that ferry goods around the world
have put the ocean shipping industry under a harsher spotlight. The profession is overwhelmingly male and
has been slow to make the kind of changes that other industries adopted in the
#MeToo era. Hicksâs case helped spark a reassessment of the workplace culture
and changes to policies and laws that govern it, yet many cases still fall into
a prosecutorial void.
Congress in 2022 passed a law to strengthen
oversight and investigations of alleged sexual assault and harassment in ocean
shipping. The industryâs main regulator mandated new training programs for
seafarers. Shipowners have made it easier to report allegations and tried to
boost the share of female workers.
Despite the changes,
prosecution is rare…The Justice Department declined to comment on specific
investigations. Officials there said the department prefers to have the Coast
Guard handle investigations into sexual harassment or abuse off shore because
the cases are complicated and difficult to prosecute.
Of the 1.9 million merchant seafarers
operating about 74,000 vessels, 1.3% are women, according to a 2021 report by
BIMCO, an association of shipping companies, and the International Chamber of
Shipping…One case that has been prosecuted so far in the U.S. involved Francis
Crowley, a former engineering student at the Merchant Marine Academy in New
York. Crowley was sentenced to nine years in prison for sexually assaulting
then 19-year-old Stephanie Sheldon in her room on campus in 1997. He served 7½
years of his sentence before being released.
Crowley was arrested and kicked out of the
academy in early 1998. At the time he was a junior and Sheldon a sophomore. She
went on to graduate with an engineering degree, then decided to become a
doctor.