Passengers travelling on cruise ships are twice as likely to be victims of a sexual assault as people on land, it was claimed this week.
Professor Ross Klein, an industry analyst, told a conference in New Zealand that cruise liners were not as safe as people assumed, and that crew members were often to blame for assaults.
Klein, from Memorial University in Newfoundland, studied figures submitted by American cruise operators to the US Congress last year and found that the rate of sexual assault on board was 59 per 100,000 – compared with an average of 32 per 100,000 on dry land. There were an additional 53 cases per 100,000 of sexual harassment.
Nearly 70 per cent of sexual assaults were carried out by crew on guests, and 10 per cent by crew against co-workers, the research found.
The number of Britons taking cruises is growing rapidly. The Passenger Shipping Association (PSA), which represents the British cruise industry, estimated that 1.3 million Britons were planning to take a cruise this year, double the number who did so a decade ago.
This growth, the PSA claims, is in part due to the UK cruise industry’s “excellent” safety record, hygiene and service.
Ships have also increased greatly in size, with the largest now able to carry more than 6,000 passengers.
The reasons given for the higher incidence of sexual assault on ships included the easy availability of alcohol, passengers letting down their guard and the predatory behaviour of some crew.
“People are on holiday, so they don’t think about the dangers,” said Klein, who is the author of three critical books on the cruise industry.
The number of sexual assaults and rapes was found to vary from ship to ship, with fewer incidents reported on the more expensive cruises, where the clientele are older.
“Senior officers have told me there are different cultures on different ships,” said Klein, after addressing the international marine tourism congress at AUT University in Auckland.
“On some, captains look the other way and crew know that they can get away with things. On others, the captains rule with an iron hand, and there’s not that sense of permissiveness.” Bill Gibbons, director of the PSA, disputes the figures. “There have of course been incidents of crime on board ship… but this is certainly not indicative of a pattern. Looking at data provided to the US Congress over a three-year period, there were four alleged sexual assaults per one million passengers. Even one is one too many, and that is why the industry is continually reviewing and improving its practices to keep cruising a safe vacation.”
The Seattle-based International Cruise Victims Organisation, a body set up to provide support for victims of crime, lists dozens of alleged offences at sea, including the disappearance of 18 people over the past three years.
In testimony before Congress last year, victims and their families claimed that many crimes go unreported because operators try to cover incidents up. They point to the fact that, of the 178 complaints of sexual assault between 2002 and 2005, only 22 have led to an arrest. Of the 18 people who have disappeared from cruise ships in the past three years, only five have been found.
The families said they had all encountered difficulties in gaining information about incidents and called for greater accountability from cruise lines. They recommended to Congress that cruise operators vet employees more closely and ships carry the means of preserving forensic evidence.
But cruise lines say that jurisdiction over crimes at sea is complicated, often involving a number of countries.
Recent cases include that of Dianne Brimble, a divorced mother of three from Queensland, who died after being given an overdose of a date-rape drug by a group of men she met on a cruise in the South Pacific in 2002.
P&O Cruises Australia said that it had since improved all aspects of passenger safety. “Those changes, which accelerated after the start of the inquest into the tragic death of Mrs Brimble, were described by counsel assisting the coroner as a complete reform of the cruise industry in so far as P&O is concerned,” the company said in a statement.
