Laurie Dishman, a 37-year-old food-services manager from Sacramento, thought she was taking a pleasant vacation to Mexico onboard the Royal Caribbean ship Vision of the Seas on February 21, 2006.  Dishman says that a ship security guard came to her room in the late night, forced his way in and raped her. 

If this were not enough, she had to deal with the negligence of the crew.  She was handed a trash bag and told to collect her own evidence—including giving herself a “rape kit” exam.  Then she was told that she might have brought the incident on herself, despite the prominent bruises she had on her neck where the guard had choked her. “The purser immediately said to me, ‘Maybe you need to control your drinking,’ “Dishman said. “They wanted a written statement from me before I could see the doctor. It was like being victimized again.”

 Naturally, she was apprehensive about going back to the Port of Miami where the cruise ships disembark from, but this past Sunday August 31 she finally faced her fears.  She spent the afternoon distributing nearly 300 pamphlets to advise people boarding the ships of danger. “There are no laws out there,” Dishman said in an interview. “All kinds of things can happen on this floating city in the middle of the ocean, and there’s no security. There’s no protection. You think you have American rights when you board a ship, but you don’t.” “The cruise industry’s number-one priority is safety of its passengers and crew,” said Terry Dale, the president and chief executive officer of the Ft. Lauderdale-based Cruise Lines International Association, which represents 24 cruise lines and 16,500 travel agencies.  “Quite simply, Americans are extremely safe at sea today.”

Despite this statement, Dishman is confident that the message that she was delivering on Sunday will lead to a new federal law as soon as Congress returns from its summer recess on Septemeber 8th.  Dishman will join other crime victims on Capitol Hill to lobby for a plan that would force cruise industry officials to change the way they do business.   

Immediate changes are needed because currently cruise ships are not required to report even the most serious crimes that are committed in international waters.
Ships inside U.S. territorial waters—within 12 miles of shore—are required to follow U.S. law when it comes to reporting crimes. But enforcement gets murky when ships are in international waters. It’s particularly a problem for cruise lines, whose ships typically are registered under the flags of Panama, Liberia or the Bahamas. Although required to report a crime, a ship may not always do so.
“Sometimes it is (reported) and sometimes it isn’t,” said Sacramento Democratic Rep. Doris Matsui, who took up Dishman’s case and requested the hearing. “There are so many loopholes. How do you enforce it?”
The cruise lines insist they follow the letter of the law. “Our member lines report all violations promptly and treat them seriously,'’ said Christine Fischer, director of communications for Cruise Lines International Association.  Congress is considering legislation that would force cruise ships to maintain logs that record all deaths, missing individuals, alleged crimes and passenger complaints of theft, sexual harassment and assault. That information would be made available to the FBI and the Coast Guard, and the public would have access to it on the Internet.