Rapes rife on cruise ships, says professor

earhtimes.org
Passengers on cruise ships are nearly twice as likely to be sexually attacked as Americans who stay at home, a professor who has studied crime rates on the high seas told a conference in New Zealand, a newspaper reported Monday. Members of the ships' crew are mainly to blame, Professor Ross Klein, a sociologist at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada, told a conference at the Auckland University of Technology, the New Zealand Herald said.
The rate of sexual assaults on cruise ships was 59 per 100,000 people compared with a norm in the US of 32 per 100,000, according to figures submitted by the industry last year to the US Congress, Klein said. There were another 53 cases per 100,000 of sexual harassment.
Klein told the conference that nearly 70 per cent of sex assaults were carried out by crew members against passengers and 10 per cent on fellow crew members. "On some ships you have crew members organizing contests between themselves to see how many passengers they can sleep with," he said. "The younger the passenger, the more points they score."