Cargo Ships: Where Sexual Assault Is a Problem and Prosecution Rare

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.