El Pais: “Sexual harassment of sailors sees the light: After decades of silence about the abuses of shipping company crew members, two victims have gone to court in the United States.”
Via: El Pais, “El acoso sexual a las marineras ve la luz: noches en el baño con un cuchillo y denuncias de violación” (Translated from Spanish to English via Google Translate)
August 21, 2022
By: Álvaro Śanchez
At 18, the United States Merchant Marine Academy sent her to the M/V Alliance Fairfax, a vessel the Danish shipping company Maersk sails loaded with vehicles. After excelling during her first year at the Academy both for her academic and athletic skills, she was sent to the ship to continue her training.
But everything was going to go wrong from the beginning. The cadet she replaced aboard the ship warned her that the crew was full of “creepy” men, advising her to avoid wearing shorts around the ship, exercising in the presence of men, and to avoid doing anything the all male crew could consider “provocative.”
But the warning didn’t do much good. After weeks of sexist jokes, sexual innuendos, and non-consensual touching, the particularly insistent attitude of one of her companions led Midshipman-Y (the pseudonym under which the young woman appears in the complaint she later filed against Maersk) to sleep locked up with a knife on the floor of her bathroom, the only place that could not be entered with the skeleton keys carried by some crew members.
And Midshipman-Y was forced to change the times when she went to rest so as not to give clues to her possible assailant. Finally, fearing being raped, she reported what had happened to the company, and asked to be urgently evacuated from the ship.
On June 14, 2022 the US law firms Sanford Heisler Sharp and Maritime Legal Solutions, PLLC jointly filed two complaints against Maersk before the New York Supreme Court: one for the harassment of Midshipman-Y, and another for the alleged rape suffered earlier by Hope Hicks, another woman who in 2019 lived through the nightmare of traveling aboard Maersk’s M/V Alliance Fairfax, a US-flagged ship 199 meters long and 32 meters wide capable of carrying almost 20,000 tons.
The briefs presented to the judge accuse Maersk of not doing enough to protect them.
Hope Hicks, who was then only 19 years old when she says she was raped aboard the Maersk vessel, used the pseudonym Midshipman-X for more than 8 months before finally daring to reveal her true identity. Her lawsuit against Maersk describes this experience:
“From the beginning, Hope, who was the only woman on board the Alliance Fairfax, was subjected to sexual harassment by male crew members that worsened over time. Halfway through her journey, Hope’s worst nightmare came true when the ship’s first engineer plied her with alcohol, waited for her until she was completely incapacitated, and raped her. Before being raped by a drunken officer more than forty years her senior, Hope was a virgin, saving herself for marriage.”
The cases of the two young women dot an industry, that of maritime transport, largely taken over by men, which has not taken measures to protect women on board until very recently. When Hicks made her rape public through a blog post last year, Maersk opened an investigation, suspended five employees and then fired them.
Now, with the complaint in court, Maersk insists to this newspaper that they are trying to change the culture that governs the seas, tainted by openly sexist behavior. And they are interviewing the more than 350 women in their workforce who work offshore to talk about the challenges they face, or what is the same, if they have experienced harassment and what to do in those cases.
“The talks, which are still taking place, show that a big culture change is needed,” admits Maersk.
In an environment like that of the sea, clearly masculine, where you can spend months many kilometers from the mainland, isolated in a small space, the stories of abuse that have not come to light are probably many more than those that have been known.
Christine Dunn, a partner at Sanford Heisler Sharp, the law firm leading the complaint, who specializes in sexual violence, believes the case may push shipping companies to make changes, as their reputations are at stake.
“Hope Hicks and Midshipman-Y are very brave in coming forward with their stories. They believe that shedding light on this issue is the only way to get justice for themselves and to make changes to Maersk and the shipping industry,” she says by email.
Despite the crack that is opening, there is no reason to think that there will be a rapid change. J. Ryan Melogy, founder of Maritime Legal Solutions, the man the two young women initially turned to for help, says by email that sexual abuse complaints must be filed in the countries where the ships are registered. And only about 100 in the world sail under the American flag.
“These women are trailblazers, but they live in the US and are being supported by powerful legal teams. There are thousands of vessels flying the Panamanian flag, for example, and if you experience abuse there, your only option is to go to court in Panama. I don’t see that happening and I think we are a long way from seeing a widespread response to maritime abuses in court.”
The sea, unpunished territory?
British journalist Rose George has thoroughly studied the sector. She embarked on a container ship for weeks, from Rotterdam to Singapore, to explain how maritime trade works —as important as it is ignored—and tells about it in the book Ninety Percent of Everything (Captain Swing). The denunciations of Maersk have not caught her by surprise, but she believes they are a brave gesture. “I’m glad they’re going to court, because there’s immense pressure on them not to: they could lose their jobs or be blacklisted.”
In her opinion, the sea is the perfect territory for impunity. “I always say that if I wanted to kill someone (not the case!), I would do it at sea. No police, no easy access, no forensic evidence collection – it’s a perfect crime scene,” she notes via email. For George, companies must have systems in place so that women on board have someone they trust to turn to if they are harassed.
Driven by the feminist rise of #MeToo, the Swedish Frida Wigur, a sailor for a decade, started the #lättaankar movement on social networks in 2017 —to weigh anchor in Spanish.
She immediately received dozens of testimonies from women, and a documentary was even shot with them.
“All women in this industry have some history of misogyny and many have been keeping those bad experiences to themselves for decades. At sea you live with sexual harassment and you will always be judged by your sex and not as a person,” she explains on the phone. Wigur compares the maritime industry with the army where women are a minority and the hierarchy is very marked.
The two recent complaints have been filed against Maersk, the world’s largest container shipping company, but Ryan Melogy is convinced that no shipping company is spared.
“It happens in all maritime companies. In each and every one. They live in a world without consequences, and I think that is the real problem,” he says bluntly.
The lawyer, who knows the industry because he has worked in it for years, is skeptical: he believes that companies will not be able to change that culture and progress must come from outside. In addition, he remembers that sometimes there are men among the victims.
“Male seafarers are also sexually harassed and abused, and men are also frequently subjected to bullying and psychological abuse that can have devastating effects on their mental health.”
A spokeswoman for the German Hapag-Lloyd, the shipping company that moves the fifth most containers in the world, assures this paper that it is not aware of such serious incidents having occurred on its ships, and has launched diversity training programs for its crew.
They recognize that the female presence is a small minority, which makes them more vulnerable on board, but they are detecting more interest: currently, of their 45 apprentices, 10 are women, 22%, a rate above the total. “Crossing the limits, as happens in non-consensual sexual acts, will not be tolerated in any way,” insists the shipping company.