Sept. 22, 2024
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. Hicks’s 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 industry’s 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 2022 law expanded the Coast Guard’s powers in dealing with sexual harassment and abuse on ships flying the U.S. flag, regardless of where they are traveling. But the vast majority of cargo ships fly flags of countries outside of the U.S., so what happens on those vessels is the responsibility of countries that tend to have weaker laws. For cases involving U.S. ships, only the Justice Department can prosecute, which it rarely does. That means most of those cases are sent back to the Coast Guard, which typically offers to drop charges in exchange for revoking the alleged perpetrators’ licenses.
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.
Cargo ships are already among the world’s most inhospitable workplaces, particularly for women. Around 95% of ship officers are male and hierarchy is strictly enforced, which lawyers and alleged victims say makes it even more difficult for a crew member to go public with accusations against a superior. The industry has had a difficult time accommodating more diversity, according to industry executives.
Another obstacle is that many sailors work on temporary contracts, a status that can make them wary of reporting cases of harassment for fear of earning a reputation for being “difficult to work with,” said Lena Dyring, director of cruise and international ferry operations for the Norwegian Seafarers’ Union. Sailors also are at sea for months, keeping alleged abusers and victims in proximity.
Hicks wrote about her experience aboard the Alliance Fairfax in a blog post in September 2021 where she identified herself as “Midshipman-X.” She reported the incident to the Coast Guard the following month, during her senior year at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, N.Y.
In June 2022, Hicks filed a lawsuit against the ship’s operator, Denmark’s A.P. Moller Maersk. The case was settled five months later.
Maersk at the time called the alleged conduct involving Hicks unacceptable, and said that the company was working with the Coast Guard, maritime academies, labor unions and others to address problems.
Maersk set up a hotline for complaints and is training its entire crew of 12,500 mariners on how to deal with and report abuse at sea. It also has introduced a policy to have at least two female crew members on its ships.
“We want a work environment where no seafarer must turn to anonymous blog posts to tell their story,” Nynne Norman Scheuer, the company’s head of marine human resources, said in an interview.
Hicks, who grew up in Marietta, Ga., said she had always wanted to become a mariner, but the incident changed her plans to pursue a career on commercial vessels. She is now an officer in the U.S. Navy, which she said is a safer work environment.
“It was absolutely worth coming forward, even though it was scary and difficult,” Hicks told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. “While significant progress has been made, there’s still years of work needed to ensure a just and safe maritime industry.”
The Coast Guard spent six months investigating Hicks’s allegations against the senior engineer, Edgar Sison, before it charged him with criminal assault and sent the case to the Justice Department. After conducting its own probe that lasted about a year, the agency declined to prosecute. Sison gave up his license in 2023.
Sison couldn’t be reached. His lawyer didn’t respond to emails and calls for comment. Sison previously has denied Hicks’s allegations.
Hicks’s case led Congress to pass the Safer Seas Act, which obligated U.S. shipping companies to report harassment cases to the Coast Guard. The law also required operators to install security cameras outside crew cabins.
A Coast Guard official declined to say how many complaints it has received before or since the Safer Seas Act was enacted in 2023, saying only that its lawyers were reviewing a number of cases.
“They are being flooded with reports,” said Ryan Melogy, a maritime lawyer who has represented harassment victims including Hicks. Melogy said he has handled eight cases over the past three years, with four alleged perpetrators surrendering their licenses, three suspended for up to 15 months and one pending. A mariner license, obtained from the Coast Guard, allows maritime academy graduates to work on merchant ships.
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.
Shipping companies have business reasons to encourage more women in the workforce. The BIMCO report said the industry needed to boost recruitment and training to avoid a shortage of officers by 2026.
The International Maritime Organization, the United Nations body that regulates global shipping, said the issue is serious and there is no easy way to address it.
“There has been an increasing awareness of violence and harassment occurring on ships, including sexual harassment, which compound the already challenging working conditions,” an IMO spokeswoman said.
She said the IMO has mandated new minimum requirements for basic training for seafarers, including how to prevent and respond to incidents of violence, bullying, harassment and sexual assault.
Ship executives and lawyers said the gender disparity starts at maritime academies.
“You have 20 male students training to run a ship and there is a single female,” said Takis Stratos, a veteran captain of cruise and cargo ships. “Like on a ship, marine academies are a tough place to be a woman.”
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.
Crowley couldn’t be reached for comment. Thomas Rossi, his lawyer, declined to comment.
“I was ostracized on campus because many thought I was alleging something that never happened,” said Sheldon, now a medical doctor in Wisconsin and a mother of three daughters. “They wanted me to quit, but I said I won’t back out.”
The Merchant Marine Academy didn’t respond to calls for comment.