Problems of men and women serving on the same ships might well be solved by having unisex ships
 While it is politically correct to have all races and cultures mixed in a multicultural melange, it violates that old seafaring principle - that ships' crews should panic in the same language.
This is why ships crews have typically been as culturally and linguistically as uniform as they can conveniently be, recognising that this cannot be a hard and fast rule in all circumstances.
Cannot the same be said of women at sea, whose presence seems to a source of constant complaint and concern? Lately, it has become a demand that men, who represent 98.8 per cent of seafarers worldwide, change their ways to accommodate the 1.2 per cent who have chosen to join them. Surely, that miniscule minority can find a half-dozen ships to staff in a global fleet of many thousands if not hundreds of thousands.
One also observes that while the allies of the Five Eyes (US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) have chosen to mix the sexes in the ranks of their armed forces ashore, aloft and afloat, their erstwhile rivals, China. Russia and North Korea have chosen segregation.
At sea this has been the source of maritime complaint at the UN's International Maritime Organisation (IMO) from what now proclaims itself as the "Ocean Rebellion". Feminist activists are particularly incensed that the IMO voted down their United States Merchant Marine Academy resolution (USMMA) "Sea Year Training to Resume with Mandatory Safety Standards to Protect Cadets Against Sexual Assault and Harassment".
The key case animating the current challenge to seafaring life is that of a young female officer cadet, aka Midshipman X, was allegedly raped by a supervisor during on board a US-flagged Maersk Line Limited ship operating in the Middle East in 2019. The woman also pointed to broader problems involving other female midshipmen at the federal service academy. The incident has prompted inquiries by Maersk which has already led to the suspension of five crewmen, as well as investigations by US authorities.
"It has been nearly six months since Maritime Legal Aid first reported the story of Midshipman X, then a 19-year-old naval officer raped by a sixtysomething first engineer aboard a Maersk ship, and five months since I wrote an open letter to our industry about the critical importance of this topic. Yet, despite a plea to the IMO by former US presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, MARAD, the US Senate, the Women’s International Shipping & Trading Association (WISTA), Women Offshore, Maersk and others (including the USCG’s Admiral, Karl Schultz), a search of the IMO’s website for any information about rape at sea still returns zero results," said Ocean Rebellion feminists.
"Since the IMO Convention entered into force over 50 years ago, the United States delegation to the IMO has played a critical role in all IMO policy development. According to the Navigational Centre For Excellence, the US Coast Guard represents the United States at the IMO," said the Ocean Rebellion press release.
Representation is important, it said, because IMO conventions are supported by hundreds of recommendations that govern every aspect of shipping, including safety, environmental concerns, legal concerns, technical cooperation, maritime security and shipping efficiency, it said.
This is also important because information has been received from a foreign flag representative of the UN body that the “US delegation has shot down an important SASH Initiative“. Typically when something like this happens we reach out to our vast network of industry leaders to verify the source, but this time, something unusual happened. Very few of our sources even know the names of the US delegates.
"Just the fact that the US delegation is run by a branch of the US military rather than the civilian US Maritime Administration is unusual. In contrast, the US delegation to the ICAO, International Civil Aviation Organisation, the aviation equivalent of the IMO, in Montreal is not run by the US Air Force, but rather by a separate group known as the USICAO that “works closely with the FAA and US Department of Transportation,” said the feminist lobby.
Perhaps unknown to them is that the US Coast Guard, except in wartime, was first in the Treasury Department, then moved to the Department of Transportation in 1967 and then more recently to the Department of Homeland Security in 2003.
"Even more concerning is we don’t even know who our readers should reach out to with questions. Questions like 'What is the USCG’s IMO delegation doing to address Secretary Buttigieg’s plea for Midshipman X reforms?' or even much broader questions like “Why is the US Merchant Marine so rusted and broken?” We don’t even know who the members of the US delegation are apart from old information published by frustrated non-profit and very rare media appearances by key delegation members.
And this is not just a US delegation problem. "We don’t know if other member countries, including those from the most socially progressive EU nations, are willing to stand in their support of Midshipman X or work to maintain the status quo?" said the feminist brief.
"Most concerning of all, the US delegation to the IMO has blocked the only sexual assault and sexual harassment initiative ever presented to the IMO. They have blocked it despite promises of better oversight from US senators, a US cabinet member, and the USCG commandant himself. They have blocked it without submitting an alternate plan." it said.
Perhaps it is high time that the IMO and the shipping world as whole take up the challenge. Most - that is the overwhelming majority - of midshipmen, as the name indicates, are male and at one time taken on board Royal Navy ships at the age of 12. Today, they are in their late teens. As boys they too were sexually abused from time to time, and perhaps have more reason to complain that women in the same role simply because of the vast differences in male versus female in-take volume.
So what is to be done? What we do not want is the unwelcome outcomes that may come about through the feminist desire for punishments to fit the crime. To put it bluntly, rather than face a rape charge the rapist may well resort to what has long been known as "Jonah's Lift" in seafaring circles over the centuries, that is throwing overboard a person not wanted on the voyage in the dark of night. This might well be the standard response of rapist to a rapee threatening legal action when she gets ashore. Perhaps it is time to think of giving women a fleet of their own. |
