More often than most people would like to think, passengers on cruise ships fall prey to sexual assaults by crew members.  Details remain sketchy as the cruise industry hastens to tidy up its image, but the outlines of the problem are beginning to be known.

Carnival Lines, the world's largest cruise line, reluctantly admitted in court in 1999 that its crew members had assaulted both passengers and fellow crew members 108 times from 1993 to 1998 – almost twice a month.

Twenty-two of the attacks were rapes, 16 of them involving crew and passengers,  the others involving crew members who assaulted fellow crew.  The remaining 86 cases involved unwanted kissing, touching and other improper advances.  Accused crew included a cabin steward, an assistant cook, supervisors, engineers and even a chief security officer.  As a result of the assaults, Carnival had fired 47 employees over the five-year span, the standard "punishment" in such cases.

It was a rape that led to the first crack in the industry's wall of secrecy.  A ship's nurse on the Carnival fleet's Imagination accused the ship's engineer of raping and sodomizing her in her cabin in 1998.  Cruise lines' standard policy was to wash their hands of involvement and make the victims decide whether to report crimes to law enforcement; some victims complained that cruise officials even pressured them against contacting police authorities.  That is what the nurse says happened in her case: she told ship's security about the rape, but ship officers talked her out of filing an official report.  Instead, when the Imagination reached port, she went to the FBI in Miami.  Before agents could reach the man she had accused, however, another standard policy had stepped in:  Carnival had already fired him and put him on a plane to Italy, his home, where he remains free.

The nurse sued Carnival Cruise Lines.  When her attorney sought Carnival's records of similar assaults on board its ships, the cruise line refused.  A Miami judge ordered the corporation to release the information, but Carnival twice appealed the order, and twice was turned down.  It was forced to make the data public.

'Image Is Everything'
Industry-wide crime statistics are virtually impossible to find both because of proactive efforts to conceal the crimes and because no central repository collects data on crimes at sea.  The difficulty is further compounded by the nature of the industry and its overriding incentive to minimize bad publicity.  As University of Pennsylvania criminologist William S. Laufer told the New York Times,  "On the seas…there is less regulation and visibility than on land and…enforcement is extremely difficult.  Cruise lines act as independent national entities on the seas."

The Regulatory Gap
As Criminologist Laufer pointed out, ''The last thing on the mind of the vacationing public is that they are vulnerable to assault when aboard a luxury cruise,'' but he warns that that is perception, not fact.  The truth is that, at sea, no law enforcement officials are aboard.  Instead, ships are like gated communities, with a privately hired security force that knows little about standard police investigative procedures when crimes occur.

For the most part, cruise liners sail under foreign flags and thus can escape most U.S. regulation, a reality the U.S. Congress has been wrestling with in attempts to beef up U.S. regulatory powers even as the cruise industry seeks a measure of deregulation. The industry's primary regulator is the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations agency whose standards govern safety, security and environmental compliance.  The U.S. Coast Guard inspects ships four times a year and reviews cruise lines' construction plans, fire drills and crews.  The Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control also have regulatory authority, but none of these address sexual assaults against passengers and other criminal behaviors.

Seldom does one crime victim have an impact on an entire industry.  In the Carnival case, however, Carnival executives acknowledged that as a result of the victim's lawsuit and the publicity which ensued, Carnival now carries rape treatment kits aboard its ships.  More importantly, the cruise industry trade association adopted a regulation requiring that all serious crimes committed aboard passenger ships must be reported to the FBI, regardless of whether the victim requests a report be made.

Stung by the bad publicity that the nurse's lawsuit and other unrelated environmental issues were generating in 1999, the International Council of Cruise Lines, which represents the 16 luxury lines that account for 90 percent of the world's cruise business, adopted a policy whereby all shipboard accusations of crime that involve a U.S. citizen or take place on any ship that calls on a U.S. port will be reported automatically to the FBI.   If the policy is more than mere image burnishing, data about the extent of the problem of sexual assaults on luxury liners at sea should become more readily available in the future.

(08/02/00)