Cruise Ship Blues: The Underside of the Cruise Ship Industry (12 page)

In June 1997 a 35-year-old woman aboard Royal Caribbean Cruise Line’s
Majesty of the Seas
claimed she was raped after returning from the nightclub at 4:00 a.m., where she had consumed only nonalcoholic beverages. She said she had been attacked by a member of the cleaning crew, and she picked the man out of a lineup conducted by the ship’s security officers. Questioned by the ship’s security officer and a company lawyer who had flown in, the worker denied being anywhere near a passenger. He said he had been washing decks — at 4:00 in the morning — and attributed the scratches on his body to minor work accidents. He was indicted, and as his trial approached, DNA evidence linked him to the assault. The crewman then switched his story; his lawyers argued that the woman had consented to sex. Because she had filed for bankruptcy just before going on the cruise, they suggested the lawsuit against Royal Caribbean Cruise Line had been planned. After four hours of deliberation, a jury acquitted the alleged attacker.
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In court papers, Royal Caribbean said it “was not responsible for a crew member’s actions outside his official duties.”
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In 1998 two cases against Carnival Cruise Lines were reported. In one, a woman on a Caribbean cruise with her husband accused a waiter of drugging their dinner drinks and later raping her in their cabin as her husband lay unconscious. The couple complained to cruise officials, who responded in part by moving them to a better cabin for the remainder of the cruise.

The case was settled just before it was set to go to trial.
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In the other case, a woman traveling with her mother claimed a room steward had raped her. “She asserts ... [he] pushed her down on one of the beds and raped her. She reported the incident immediately to ship personnel, who questioned [the steward]. He denied the charge.”
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The disposition of that case is unknown.

In 2000 two young women on separate cruises with Premier Cruises reported being raped by the same 30-year-old employee. In one case, the passenger was returning to the disco from her cabin. She asked a crew member for directions; he proceeded to lead her down a dead end and then sexually assaulted her. Although immediately fired and confined to his cabin, the crew member was not turned over to American authorities when the ship returned to Boston.

Also in 2000 a 40-year-old woman was raped in a restroom aboard the
SeaEscape
by another passenger. Her attacker was not found.

Socializing: Rules versus Practice

Policies prohibiting crew from socializing with passengers are often ignored; there are many cases of consensual relationships involving passengers and crew. Only when there is an attack or a complaint are policies prohibiting these contacts apparently

enforced. The usual situation, according to a musician who worked for both Carnival Cruise Line and Royal Caribbean Cruise Line, is that “sex between crew and passengers happens all the time. Every cruise, every day. Crew go into guest cabins and guests go to crew cabins. Both seek it out, passengers and crew.” A bartender employed by Carnival Cruise Line suggests that crew members make a sport of having sex with passengers, describing the practice as simply “part of the game.”
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m
BAD BILL

Although cruise lines have policies that prohibit crew from fraternizing with passengers, there are not similar policies for officers and staff. In fact, officers are in many cases urged to socialize with passengers. However “socializing” is subject to different interpretations, and in many cases it isn’t limited to a drink and a dance.

According to a woman who worked on a cruise ship for five years:

Some officers were notorious womanizers. In my first weeks at sea, I was so naive that I

actually visited an officer’s cabin and admired his photos of his beautiful blond sister — before realizing that she was really his wife.

I got wise. Others didn’t. One passenger had been swept off her feet, on an earlier cruise, by a chief engineer ... and though he was no longer with the company, she always insisted on being seated, for nostalgic reasons, at the chief [engineer]’s table in the dining room.

Officers usually relished female attention, but a few had to dodge unwanted advances. One engineer locked himself in his cabin for an entire cruise to avoid a young woman he had wooed on a previous sailing; she had returned with her mother, who was talking marriage. As an escape trick, some officers would arrange in advance to be paged at a certain time. “My beeper,” they’ll tell a lovesick lady as they dashed off the dance floor. “Duty calls.”
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Under the Microscope: The New Zero-Tolerance Policy

Disclosures of sexual assaults brought considerable media attention to the way in which cruise lines dealt with assaults. This led four companies — Carnival Corporation, Royal Caribbean Cruises Limited, Crystal Cruises, and Princess Cruises — to sign a letter in July 1999, under the auspices of the ICCL, pledging zero tolerance of crime and a commitment to report all crimes involving American citizens to the FBI. Whether crimes against non-American citizens will be reported remains unclear two and a half years later.

A 1998
New York Times
article describes the pattern of response common at that time. Based on examination of court records and on interviews with cruise line employees, law enforcement officials, and passengers and their lawyers, the article suggested that there was

a pattern of cover-ups that often began as soon as the crime was reported at sea, in international waters where the only police are the ship’s security officers. Accused crewmem-bers are sometimes put ashore at the next port, with airfare to their home country. Industry lawyers are flown to the ship to question the accusers; and aboard ships flowing

with liquor, counterclaims of consensual sex are common.

The cruise lines aggressively contest lawsuits and insist on secrecy as a condition of settling.
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According to a former chief of security for Carnival Cruise Line:

You don’t notify the FBI. You don’t notify anybody. You start giving the victims bribes, upgrading their cabins, giving them champagne and trying to ease them off the ship until the legal department can take over. Even when I knew there was a crime, I was supposed to go in there and do everything in the world to get Carnival to look innocent.
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Once a crime is reported, there are problems with preserving evidence. Cabins are routinely cleaned twice a day, so much evidence is destroyed very quickly, and there is often a significant delay between the time of an attack and landing at a American port. Rape experts suggest that cases reported within 72 hours provide the best forensic evidence, but this time frame is difficult for attacks that occur on a cruise ship. In addition, many victims are likely to delay making a report as long as they are aboard a ship because of fear of reprisal and because there is no independent investigator or rape-treatment centre. Simply put, rapes on cruise ships are often not reported until it is too late for criminal investigation.

Even in cases where a sexual assault is reported in a timely manner, victims and prosecutors are faced with the common practice of cruise lines immediately sending the accused crew member back home, purportedly because he has violated company policies that prohibit fraternizing between passengers and crew. Reporters for the
Miami New Times
found that in each of five lawsuits against Carnival Cruise Line they reviewed, the employee was swept out of the country immediately after the ship arrived in port. In one case, the employee was later rehired by the company; he was subsequently served with a summons while at the dock in Los Angeles. Carnival’s lawyers successfully argued the Indian citizen couldn’t be sued in American courts because American laws did not apply to him: not only was he a foreigner, but the alleged crime took place in Barbados on a ship registered in Panama. The passenger’s lawsuit against Carnival Cruise Line was settled out of court.
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It remains to be seen whether these patterns continue under the cruise industry’s “zero tolerance” pledge. Sadly, “zero tolerance” seems to refer to how cases of rape are handled once reported; it does not reduce the risk of assault nor make reporting an attack any easier.

AVOIDING UNNECESSARY ILLNESS

I have been fortunate on the cruises I have taken. Other than the results of overeating, I have avoided gastrointestinal illness. Many times I have seen colds and influenzas spread like wildfire among passengers, and I’ve met a significant number of passengers who have suffered gastrointestinal ailments resulting from contaminated or improperly stored food.

Many cruise passengers rely on the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to ensure safe and sanitary conditions. After several major disease outbreaks on cruise ships, the CDC initiated its Vessel Sanitation Program in cooperation with the cruise industry. The program’s primary goal is to lower the risk of gastrointestinal and other disease outbreaks on cruise ships.

Twice a year, Vessel Sanitation Program staff conduct surprise inspections of cruise ships visiting American ports. The inspection focuses on such things as the ship’s food and water supply, the “practices and personal hygiene of employees,” the “general cleanliness and physical condition of the ship,” and “the ship’s training programs.” A ship is scored for its compliance on 41 items; the passing mark is 86 points out of 100. When a ship fails to pass inspection, a follow-up inspection is conducted within 30 to 60 days.

The CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program has had positive results. In the 1970s and 1980s, cruise ships suffered 12 to 15 outbreaks of gastroenteritis (or similar illness) every year. By the early 1990s the number had decreased and was down to 10 outbreaks in 1997 and 9 in 1998.

While the number of outbreaks of gastrointestinal illness aboard cruise ships has decreased, the proportion of outbreaks caused by contaminated food or water (rather than by person-to-

person contact) has increased. The proportion of food and water contamination caused by agents such as salmonella and shigellosis have remained constant over time, but the percentage of outbreaks caused by Norwalk-like viruses have increased to one-third of all cases.
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Passengers commonly use CDC sanitation inspection scores as a definitive guide to the “health” of a cruise ship. The scores do provide some insight — but no guarantee. The simple fact is that ships with passing scores still have violations; many violations do not result in point deductions. For example, I checked the Vessel Sanitation Program report posted on the Internet prior to going on a cruise aboard the
Radisson Diamond
; the ship had received a passing score of 93. The complete report, however, indicated serious problems with the water purification system, that an adult