Unspoken at Sea: Why Maritime Cannot Fix What It Still Cannot See
For all the procedures, policies and reporting channels that now exist across global shipping, one uncomfortable problem remains: an industry can only respond to what it knows about, and much of what happens to people at sea may never be formally reported at all.
That gap between what takes place onboard and what eventually reaches management, regulators or investigators sits at the heart of Unspoken, an initiative developed through the All Aboard Alliance to better understand abuse and misconduct at sea, particularly sexual misconduct, by listening directly to the people who experience it.
Susanne Justesen, Director of Human Sustainability at the Global Maritime Forum, describes the initiative as part of a much broader effort to improve safety, health, inclusion and wellbeing across maritime. The All Aboard Alliance, established in 2022, now brings together dozens of maritime companies around shared industry challenges that no single organisation can realistically solve alone, from diversity and inclusion to psychological safety and the long-term attractiveness of a career at sea.
Unspoken is one part of that work, but it tackles an area where silence itself has become part of the problem.
The experiences traditional systems may never capture
Most responsible shipping companies already have grievance procedures, whistleblowing mechanisms and investigation processes, and those systems remain essential, but the existence of formal reporting channels does not necessarily mean they are capturing the full reality of what people experience onboard.
Jeremy Sutton, Chief Executive of Swire Shipping and newly announced co-chair of the All Aboard Alliance, describes that gap plainly. Misconduct and abuse are difficult enough to report in a shore-based workplace and can become considerably more complicated onboard a ship, where the workplace is also home, hierarchies are pronounced and the same people may continue living and working together for months.
Unspoken therefore asks a different question: what could the industry learn if seafarers were able to share experiences anonymously and confidentially without believing they were entering a formal company reporting process?
The initiative invites seafarers across ranks and trades to describe experiences of abuse and misconduct, with a particular focus on sexual misconduct, so those lived experiences can be used to build a clearer global framework around what the behaviour looks like, how it can be prevented, how organisations should respond when it occurs and what effective accountability should ultimately look like. The All Aboard Alliance describes the project as using anonymised insights from seafarers to identify systemic gaps and develop practical standards for preventing and responding to unwanted sexual behaviour at sea.
That distinction matters because Unspoken is not an alternative route for reporting an incident that requires immediate company action, nor is it intended to undermine existing procedures. Its purpose is to expose the patterns, behaviours and experiences that those procedures may never capture in the first place, creating a body of knowledge from which the wider industry can begin to understand not only what is happening, but why people may choose not to report it through conventional channels.
Psychological safety is more than having a hotline
It is easy to assume that creating a mechanism for reporting automatically creates a culture in which people will use it, but psychological safety is far more complicated than the existence of an email address, phone number or policy.
Justesen points to the calculation people often make before deciding whether to disclose an experience: what will I gain by telling somebody, and what might it cost me personally? If somebody fears retaliation, damaged career prospects, disbelief, social isolation onboard or an investigation process they do not trust, the perceived cost of speaking can easily outweigh the potential benefit, making silence an understandable response rather than evidence that nothing is wrong.
This is why trust in the process matters as much as trust in colleagues or management. An organisation can state that reporting is encouraged, but unless people believe the process will protect them, support them and lead somewhere meaningful, there can remain a substantial distance between what a policy promises and what an individual actually experiences.
For maritime, that distinction matters because every experience that remains unreported represents more than a missing statistic; it is also a lost opportunity to understand where systems, leadership or onboard culture are failing, and without that understanding it becomes considerably harder to design meaningful prevention.
Sexual misconduct is not solely a women's issue
Much of the industry discussion around harassment and sexual violence has understandably focused on women, particularly as maritime attempts to attract and retain more female seafarers, but the issue is broader than gender alone.
Sutton argues that some behaviours now receiving greater scrutiny may have existed for years within overwhelmingly male shipboard environments, meaning the lessons emerging from Unspoken could ultimately prove relevant to everybody working at sea rather than only to women entering traditionally male crews.
At the same time, gender balance remains an important part of the wider cultural conversation, and Swire Shipping provides a useful example of how collaboration can force companies to reconsider approaches they previously believed were sensible.
Its earlier strategy had been to place women across a larger number of vessels, spreading representation throughout the fleet, but work undertaken through the All Aboard Alliance prompted a different approach, with higher concentrations of women placed aboard fewer vessels in order to create a stronger onboard community rather than leaving individual female seafarers isolated within heavily male crews.
Sutton says that experience changed the company's thinking, while Swire Shipping has also set a target for women to represent 20% of its seafarers by 2030, compared with approximately 15% currently.
The significance is not simply the percentage itself, but the willingness to examine an established approach, acknowledge that another model may work better and make a measurable change as a result.
Culture is also a business issue
For years, conversations around diversity, inclusion and welfare have often been framed primarily as matters of corporate responsibility, but that framing becomes increasingly inadequate when the same issues directly affect whether maritime can attract, retain and develop the workforce it needs.
Sutton is clear that these challenges have a real business impact, because companies that cannot create environments in which people feel safe, respected and able to build sustainable careers will inevitably struggle to compete for talent.
That commercial reality may prove one of the strongest forces for change, because human sustainability stops being something separate from operational performance when recruitment, retention, leadership, safety and reputation are all affected by it.
Justesen's longer-term ambition pushes that accountability further. Under its 2030 strategy, the All Aboard Alliance is working towards greater transparency, global standards defining what good, better and best practice look like, and financial incentives that encourage adoption across the maritime value chain. Its four overarching goals encompass safe working conditions, physical and mental health, inclusion and diversity, and flexible and attractive careers.
The potentially transformative element is that responsibility does not necessarily stop with the shipowner. Justesen envisages a future in which cargo owners, charterers, major consumer brands and other parts of the supply chain increasingly consider the conditions experienced by the people aboard the vessels carrying their goods, creating commercial incentives for companies that invest seriously in crew welfare while making poor practice progressively harder to hide behind minimum compliance.
That would represent a significant shift in how maritime understands responsibility, because the treatment of people at sea would no longer be viewed solely as an internal employment matter between a shipping company and its workforce, but as something the entire supply chain has a legitimate interest in understanding and influencing.
What Unspoken at Sea Is Asking the Industry to Confront
There will be no single initiative, regulation or corporate policy capable of eliminating abuse and misconduct at sea, and neither Justesen nor Sutton presents Unspoken as an instant solution. Its importance lies instead in creating a structured way of listening before the industry claims to understand the problem, because effective standards cannot be built solely from assumptions about what happens onboard when the experiences of the people living those realities remain largely unseen.
That is particularly important in an industry accustomed to solving highly technical problems, because human behaviour does not always respond neatly to procedures, checklists or minimum standards. Changing culture requires evidence, trust, leadership and a willingness to listen to experiences that may be deeply uncomfortable for organisations to hear, while meaningful accountability requires those lessons to result in something more substantial than another policy document.
Unspoken begins with an acknowledgement that maritime does not yet know enough about what people experience, what prevents them from speaking and what makes them believe that reporting will or will not lead to meaningful action.
Rather than representing a weakness, recognising that gap may be one of the most important steps the industry can take, because maritime cannot prevent what it does not understand, cannot correct what it cannot see and cannot credibly promise safer careers at sea while some of the experiences shaping those careers remain unspoken.
────────────────────────────
SUPPORTED BY
CHIRP Maritime & The Seafarers’ Charity
────────────────────────────
CHIRP Maritime is an independent confidential reporting programme that helps improve safety across the maritime industry by sharing lessons from real incidents, near misses and concerns raised by those working at sea.
The Seafarers’ Charity supports seafarers and their families around the world through grant funding, practical assistance and partnerships focused on welfare, safety, health and long-term wellbeing.
Comments