Lost At Sea - Missing Persons on Cruises
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Staff WriterDecember 30, 2005 2:38 PMEarlier this month, Cruise industry executives from Carnival Cruise Lines and Royal Caribbean Cruises testified to a congressional committee regarding the disappearance of passengers from cruises. Statistics about the number of people who go missing on cruises are finally beginning to come to light. As frightening as this is, disappearance from a cruise is unlikely, as these cruise lines admit that they have had 13 passengers go missing out of a total of about 20 million passengers who took a cruise in the past 5 years or so. Your odds are fewer than one in million to disappear on a cruise (but still better than winning the lottery, it sounds like). However, if you are one of those folsk who goes on a cruise every year, the odds get better.
What was really interesting and revealing about FBI agent Chris Swecker's terstimony (and a little more disconcerting) is the number of crimes reported to the FBI for investigation on cruise lines. According to the testimony, the FBI has investigated 305 serious criminal cases on cruise lines in the past 5 years. Forty-five percent of those were sexual assaults on cruises,
22 percent were physical assaults or attacks on cruise lines, 10 percent were missing persons (that equates to about 31 people - I guess they found most of the missing passengers), and 8% of the investigations involved a death on a cruise line.
However, there is no obligation for the cruise lines to report any of these crimes, so there's a good chance these events are underreported. There's probably a good reason for public outcry, however, when someone disappears and the cruise line neither reports it nor makes an attempt to contact the family, as was the case with Merrian Carver, a 40 year old woman who disappeared from a Royal Caribbean cruise line off Alaska and whose family has filed a lawsuit against the cruise line. Cruise line officials simply boxed up her belongings and made no attempt to contact her family when she turned up missing and had not used her room. Now that they have come under more scrutiny, the cruise line tracks disembarking passengers to make sure all have returned safely.