Do you ever think about just how big the ocean is or how many people make a living by traveling across it? Commercial ships can travel for miles and miles without encountering another vessel. And by all accounts, it can be a lonely experience. The only people you see for months at a time are the people working alongside you. And in many cases, they're likely to be men. But what kind of safeguards are in place for the women who work on these ships? My guest this week are CNN's Melanie Hicken and Blake Ellis. They have the story of how the U.S. Coast Guard has allowed sexual assault at sea to go unchecked for years. What led one woman to say enough is enough? From CNN, this is One Thing. I'm David Rind.

Melanie, Blake, you are both senior writers on our investigative team. So, Melanie, where does this particular investigation begin?

So this investigation began with a young woman named Hope Hicks. And no, not the young woman named Hope Hicks you were thinking of.

Not the Trump one.

Not the one from the Trump administration. This young woman was a student at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, which you probably haven't heard of. Blake and I hadn't heard of it until we started reporting on her story. But it's actually a federal service academy, kind of like West Point or the Naval Academy. But this one is in Long Island, New York, and it trains people to be merchant mariners.

I was so excited. I showed up ready to go.

So merchant mariners work on commercial ships all over the world. Hope was training to be an engineer.

So I knew I was going to love it.

And she was sent by her school to something known as Sea Year.

It's really our first experience with hands on engineering or deck work.

You have to do all of these hours out on a commercial ship. And it's unusual in that they send students to a ship with pretty much all working adults.

As a female at the academy. A lot of the upper class females will take you under your wing and they'll kind of allude to the fact that you should stay safe at sea. You should use caution with a lot of.

They actually had this bizarre tradition where they had a pizza party where older women would warn them about what they had faced when they'd been sent out during sea, or they would tell them that crew members were known to steal bras and underwear from the laundry room, that you had to be careful not to wear anything, quote, provocative, that that might cause trouble for you and that even working out in the gym on board these ships could lead to unwanted attention.

It was very clear, very early on that I was not welcome on the ship.

But she told us that as soon as she stepped on board, she really finally understood what it was like to be a young woman on a ship full of men.

They would ask specifically me, not my male partner. Why do you even want to be out here? Or you're way too pretty to be out here.

And someone who really made her feel uncomfortable was her boss. The other weird thing about this is she lived on this ship. You live and work alongside each other. And so not only did her boss make her feel uncomfortable, but his bedroom was right next to hers.

The first engineer said, If you come to his room right now and we party a little bit, then he'll give us the day off tomorrow.

And one night she heard him and other top officers on the ship getting quite boisterous. They were drinking. They were trying to pressure her to come join them in drink.

I felt like I had no option but to partake in whatever was going on. I felt a push to be one of the guys.

She basically felt like she couldn't turn them down because they were her bosses and so they pressured her to take shot after shot of alcohol, something she had never done before, and she ended up becoming extremely intoxicated. And at that point, that is when she said he raped her alone in her bedroom.

When I woke up the next morning, I was the most scared that I've ever felt in my life. I felt a sense of panic. I woke up completely naked in my bed, my room was destroyed, my sheets were bloody, and I immediately knew what had happened.

It is important to note that we did reach out to Hope's alleged assailant multiple times. It took us a while to reach him because we believe he was working out on ships. But when we did finally reach him, he denied her claims.

So what did she do about it?

So unfortunately, as we heard over and over again during the course of this investigation, there are just so many reasons not to report a sexual assault at sea. And in Hope's case, she woke up in the morning and was terrified. She knew she was trapped on this ship with her boss, with the man she says had raped her. She had 50 more days of her training program left. She thought about potentially telling the captain or other crew members that she knew that they were good friends with her alleged assailant. So she stayed quiet.

I made the decision to stay on board because I felt like that was the only decision I had.

And that she worried she could get kicked out of the academy because fear is one of the biggest requirements that the Academy has in order to graduate.

Like her future is at stake here.

Exactly.

And it never even crossed my mind that I should report things. In my mind, no one was ever going to believe me at this point.

So she decided to just kind of suffer through the next 50 days working with her same boss. And she finally went back to campus after the year completed, and she was hoping to put it all behind her, but she fell into a pretty deep depression and she knew she wanted to do something. She wasn't sure what. So at first she became a victim advocate at the academy, and that's when she heard about nine other female students who said that they were also raped at sea during the Academy year.

Hearing every single thing that these women had to go through. It made my heart sad. I don't know how else to describe it. I was definitely angry.

So it was the fall of 2021 that she decided to write out everything that happened to her. She got in touch with an advocate in the maritime industry who runs this Instagram, and she published the entire account and immediately it just spread like wildfire throughout the entire maritime industry, throughout the academy. Shipping companies, the government and the academy immediately reported it to the Coast Guard because the Coast Guard is the agency that's charged with investigating crimes that occur at sea.

Which says the Coast Guard is in charge of investigating these incidents that happen on private boats at sea. Like, how does that work?

Yeah. And what's interesting about the Coast Guard is it has all these different roles. So you may you know, I personally thought of the Coast Guard. I live in California, so I'm used to the Coast Guard patrolling our shores. If there's a dive boat accident, it's the Coast Guard that goes out to try to help rescue people. Right. But the Coast Guard also has a division that is in charge of just the general safety on commercial ships. So, you know, one of the lesser known duties is ensuring that the more than 200,000 people known as merchant mariners. So the kind of person hope was training to be. They have to get government credentials from the Coast Guard. And so the Coast Guard was not just in charge of investigating Hope's alleged rapist. On the criminal side of things, but they are also in charge of ensuring that even if he's not criminally charged, is he safe to have that credential? And one of the problems was that mariners themselves didn't even really understand the Coast Guard's role in all this. And so we started diving into this and found that, you know, of the rare cases that did make it to the Coast Guard to be investigated. So these rare cases that did involve sexual assault and misconduct, we started seeing that even the way those were handled was also problematic.

So if I understand what you both are saying, claims of sexual assault at sea rarely make it all the way to the Coast Guard to be investigated, in part because some mariners aren't even aware that option is available to them. But for the cases that do make it there, those investigations can be problematic. Blake, what is that look like? What do you mean?

Yeah. So for this investigation, we reviewed hundreds of pages of Coast Guard records. And so, first of all, as Melanie said, we found that punishments for sexual misconduct are extremely rare. And then in those rare cases where actions have been taken, sanctions have been very minimal. And so the Coast Guard couldn't point us to a single successful prosecution of a mariner for a sex crime It had investigated over the past 30 years.

Wow. Not one.

Not one. And at the time we published our story, the agency hadn't revoked a single credential of a merchant mariner for sexual misconduct aboard a ship within the last decade. But at the same time, we saw that they take offenses such as drug violations, extremely seriously. And in one contrast, we found that a mariner who had failed a drug test because he had been using CBD oil for a hurt knee, had his credential revoked entirely while the Coast Guard itself found that a chief mate on a ship had repeatedly raped his subordinate and even used the master key on the ship to break into a student's bedroom and try to solicit sex from her. And he only had his credentials suspended for a matter of months. And then I think the other really big issue that we looked at was how long the criminal investigations take into sexual misconduct, because the Coast Guard will wait until these criminal investigations resolve generally until they start to go after a mariners credential. And the Coast Guard even agreed that this is a problem. But they said at the same time, it's tricky because they need to afford alleged perpetrators their due process as well. So there's no easy solution.

We were able to interview two top Coast Guard officials and they did acknowledge that they were concerned about how certain sexual misconduct cases were handled, but they would not comment on some of the specific situations we highlighted. To them, though, they did say that given the complexities of every case, they would not categorize past decisions as, quote, failures. So they talked to us about a number of changes they think are important, including the creation of a centralized reporting system, outreach to mariners to try to build trust so that victims actually will come forward sooner and more frequently. One of the the officials we talked to said, you know, he kept saying that their mission is report, report, report.

But I guess what about the private businesses, the companies that own these boats? If they get a sense that someone is being investigated for an alleged sex crime or some kind of misconduct, wouldn't they want that person off the boat as well? Like, why aren't they taking action irregardless of what the Coast Guard is doing?

Yeah, no, exactly. And so we found that, of course, the companies and the unions that represent these workers have a big role in this themselves. But what they were telling us is that they can only react to what they know. Maersk, for example, was the company that employed Hope's alleged rapist. And Maersk did let him and other people involved with the incident go. You know, they told us they couldn't determine what had happened because people would not cooperate with the investigation, but they used that and the alcohol consumption as a way to let their employees go. But after that point, any other company that were to hire him would not be notified by the Coast Guard of the fact that he was under criminal investigation.

So where do things stand for Hope Hicks and her career as a merchant mariner all this time later?

So Hope actually graduated in June. And right around then she filed a lawsuit against the operator of the ship that she was on, Maersk Limited. And that case settled recently for an undisclosed amount. She's in the Navy now, and she did tell us that she hopes down the road to find something she can do that would help other victims of sexual assault in the industry. But she also remains incredibly frustrated.

The Coast Guard needs to be the enforcer, the overall person that lays down the law and actually enforces those laws. Without that, nothing is ever going to change.

When we published our story, no action had been taken against her alleged assailants credential. But the day after we published it, the Coast Guard did file a complaint to try to suspend his credential for a year, specifically related to alcohol offenses that stemmed from that same incident. And the Department of Justice wouldn't tell us whether its close to any sort of decision in terms of a criminal prosecution. And her boss continues to deny all the allegations against him. And until his credential is actually taken away, he remains free to work.

The maritime industry and tries to cover up what happened. And they care more about the work being done by the people in the industry than if they are bad people or not.

In fact, we recently heard from a female mariner who was absolutely furious to discover that he was working on the same ship as her. When our story was published and she couldn't believe he was allowed to lead a team of crew members who had no idea that he had been accused of raping a student and was being actively investigated by the Coast Guard.

And she only discovered this because of your guys, a story.

It was actually really crazy because this it almost came full circle in a really disturbing way. This woman was quoted in our story as another rape victim. It just really spoke to you know, this is an issue that isn't going to go away until more changes are made.

Hmm. It's fascinating reporting. Blake, Melanie, thank you so much.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you.

One Thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Eryn Mathewson, Paola Ortiz and me, David David. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Faiz Jamil is our senior producer. Greg Peppers is our supervising producer. And Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. Special thanks this week to Isabel Chapman. And thank you for listening. We'll be back next Sunday. Talk to you then.