Stranded at sea: amateur female sailors speak of sexual abuse by captains they met online

Chloe Russell* was in her 40s when she decided to quit her desk job and embark on a sailing journey around French Polynesia.

With no boat and little experience, she joined Crewbay, a site connecting amateur crew with work. She included her LinkedIn profile, where she soon received a message from a ship captain.

After exchanging messages online for two months, she agreed to join him on board for a month-long journey.

But on her first night on board, she quickly became uncomfortable when the skipper seemed too eager to refill her wine glass.

“When he started to caress my leg and back … I was terrified,” she says. “I told him I am a victim of paedophilia and incest and I could not have intimate relations with someone I don’t know.”

Russell says she excused herself for a swim but the captain went in after her, stripping off his clothing. When she tried to leave by climbing the ladder, the captain approached from behind and pinned her against the side of the boat, ignoring her pleas to stop.

And it was there, alone in the middle of the ocean, that she says she was raped.

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Over the past six months, Guardian Australia has spoken with more than a dozen women who say they have had negative – sometimes terrifying – experiences after meeting skippers through popular sailing websites such as Crewbay. Their claims include sexual assault and harassment, while others were made to feel unsafe.

All of the women had been offered what they thought was the opportunity of a lifetime: cheap accommodation and international travel in exchange for volunteer work on sailing vessels. Instead, some say they found themselves in a nightmare situation alongside volatile or predatory skippers on the high seas, with nowhere to escape.

Both Crewbay and the Australian-based Find A Crew boast of having extensive global networks of crews and captains, allowing experienced and amateur sailors to be matched with boats around the world. On-site testimonials recount glorious adventures and the joys of finding new lifelong friends.

The sites insist the vast majority of users have a positive experience and that they have processes in place for evaluating complaints, and verification systems for paying clients.

But the women say more needs to be done to protect users and they are speaking out to warn others of the potential dangers.

Captains with a criminal past

Kirsty Molloy* used Crewbay to link up last July with Craig Naylor*, a “38-year-old” surfer and captain sailing around Fiji with an international crew.

She arrived at his boat, excited about the journey ahead, only to find Naylor looked older than what was clearly a fake profile photo.

Out at sea days later, Naylor got drunk and screamed at her in front of other crew members, threatening to drop her off at the nearest land – whether it was inhabited or not.

Naylor, who is actually in his mid-40s, was later arrested by Fijian authorities and charged with one count of causing actual bodily harm to another female crew member Molloy had worked with.

The captain’s age and appearance weren’t the only things he was hiding.

Molloy later learned Naylor was a convicted sex offender who had spent 18 months in jail after breaking into a woman’s home and sexually assaulting her.

Stories like this have seen thousands of frustrated women turn to the private Facebook group “Sailing Safely for Women”, which shares safety information and the experiences women have had.

It was there that three women Guardian Australia spoke to realised they had been sexually harassed – and one sexually assaulted – by the same man: a Swiss captain who was recruiting through Crewbay last year. They also learned that the captain had been sentenced to six years in jail for rape in the late 1990s, and spent a decade on the high seas averting police before finally being captured.

‘Disgusted and confused’

Jessie Brown* says the captain had persistently badgered her for sex and groped her while she was on board his boat in the Caribbean last year.

“In the end, he said he will let me go if I lie next to him for 15 minutes,” she says. “He started touching my body … and groped my breasts, my stomach, then my hips, my butt.”

The 24-year-old says she told the captain to stop and fell asleep. The next morning she says she was awoken by the sound of heavy breathing and the captain standing over her.

“I felt genitals in my hand and he was just like, ‘you have to satisfy me otherwise I can’t work’,” Brown says. “I was really disgusted and confused.”

Another sailor Katy Read* says the same captain called her “sexy”, asked to touch her breasts and showed her naked images of several young women on his phone.

The 21-year-old was alone on the boat with the captain last August and says she was terrified that he would enter her cabin at night.

“When he drove me with his little boat to the land, right when he left me I started to cry,” she says.

The captain also had a profile on Find A Crew. Both sailing sites have since banned him, but victims and critics say their experiences show there should be more stringent vetting of users.

Georgie Allen, a project manager at the International Seafarers’ Welfare and Assistance Network, says all networking sites have a responsibility to protect users and keep them safe.

“If you are facilitating those connections, there needs to be a responsibility for the safety of those who are using that platform,” she says.

How can websites reduce risks?

No digital platform can control the behaviour of its users in the real world, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a role to play in creating a safe environment.

Prof Nicolas Suzor is a researcher at the Queensland University of Technology and an expert in the governance of the digital world. He says it is vital that platforms are designed to minimise risks, with honest review systems, robust complaints processes and mechanisms in place to verify people’s identities.

After much criticism that it was not doing enough to protect women, the dating app Tinder made substantial changes to its safety policies, including allowing US users to run background checks on matches to see if they have been arrested or convicted of a violent crime, or are on a sex offender registry in the US.

Suzor says the power imbalances between captains and female crew members volunteering and working on ships amplify the risks involved.

“I think this sounds like incredibly complex territory that could really result in a lot of potential harm,” he says.

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Crewbay founder Oliver Wells says the site deals with allegations on an individual basis, and recommends victims make a formal complaint to police.

“When we find out about people who have committed physical or sexual abuse then we blacklist them,” Wells tells Guardian Australia.

He says the site provides an ID verification check for premium members, marked on their profiles.

“If we introduced a global criminal record check on all users before they were allowed to use the site then it would impose a large cost to sign up.”

Wells also says the site refers people who say they have suffered sexual assaults to an external 24-hour multilingual helpline, Yacht Crew Help.

Find A Crew declined to comment on its safety processes, instead directing the Guardian to the site’s help section. This states that the site offers a paid verification system and includes a list of precautionary questions to ask users ahead of a journey.

Another site feature that worries some sailors is that Find A Crew allows crew and captains to search for romance and nudity. Several women told Guardian Australia they feel this blurs the lines between volunteering, work and dating.

Find A Crew did not respond to questions about this feature but its site says that “by having this option, we can show profiles of members who may be seeking romance only to like-minded members and not to others”.

Some negative reviews not being published

Review systems are a bone of contention between the women who spoke to Guardian Australia and the sailing platforms, who say they are restricted by defamation law in what they can legally publish.

Jessica Hunt* had a captain get drunk and threaten to hurt her after accusing her of stealing his things.

“He left me there in the middle of the night on Martinique, an island where I didn’t know anybody,” she says. “I was staying close to the marina and I was really scared he was going to do something to me.”

Despite Hunt making a report to police, Crewbay told her via email that they could not publish her review of the captain because they had “no proof” of it being true.

The site described her review as “too anecdotal” and said it needed to be “backed up with some facts” otherwise it would sound like “a rant”.

Wells said Crewbay “never block a negative review unless it violates the site terms of agreement, which includes defamatory, inaccurate and abusive language”.

“We completely agree that an honest review system is essential for transparency, and we try our level best to provide that, but we would also say that a review is not the place to make accusations of a crime,” they said.

The company says in cases where there is a police report, corroborating third party witnesses or “documented proof”, they permanently block the guilty party before warning every member who has been in contact with the user, as well as other crewing sites.

Without those things, the company says, it is “left in a difficult position as to how to fairly deal with both sides”.

“We’re aware that our system isn’t perfect and has many of the same pitfalls as the legal process, namely these cases often come down to one person’s word against another, with no way of proving who is telling the truth,” Wells said.

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Suzor points out most victims do not report sexual abuse to police, and that it would be even more difficult to do so if they are sailing in international waters, don’t speak the local language or fear repercussions from an abuser living nearby.

‘They think they’re frickin’ cowboys’

After her alleged rape, Russell stayed on the boat for another two weeks in a haze of denial and confusion. She says by pretending everything was OK she was shielding herself from the reality of what had occurred.

“After he raped me, I let him have intercourse with me,” Russell says. “I was a broken toy. I was worth nothing.”

The captain later told her that he did not want a relationship as he was married and had children.

She never reported the incident to police, fearing the wealthy captain would counter-sue and it would be her word against his.

After seeing a psychiatrist, however, Russell did report her rapist to Crewbay last year, at which point the site was sympathetic and agreed to ban him.

Desperate to protect other women, Russell also sent them a list of safety tips for first-time crew, including suggestions such as asking captains for a copy of their passport, video chatting before jumping on board and noting the contact details for local police. The platform took a year to post the list of tips to its site and did not include specific warnings about sexual harassment and assault, despite Russell’s numerous requests.

Crewbay, which launched in 2004, claims “the site has had safety tips, including for female solo users, since 2018”. But web archive screenshots from 2019 do not appear to have such safety information listed.

After her own experience, Molloy swears she will never sail with another captain. Despite being an amateur sailor, she’s now saving money to buy a 34-foot monohull.

“Me learning on my own boat and crashing it, it’s less of a risk than putting my life in the hands of a toxic captain,” she says.

“These men, they think they’re frickin’ cowboys and that they can do whatever they want.”

* Names have been changed

• Do you know more? Email eden.gillespie@theguardian.com

• In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233).