P&O Cruises disputes Canadian professor's sex assault claims
Date: 11 Sep 2007
P&O Cruises today disputed claims made by a visiting Canadian professor regarding sexual assault on ships in Australia and New Zealand.
No crew member or passenger has been charged with sexual assault on one of our ships since May 2005, which is when a full-time land-based security officer was appointed with responsibility for compiling these records.
Unfortunately, Professor Klein has used figures that are not an accurate representation of P&O Cruises’ experience in Australia and New Zealand where we carry more than 100,000 passengers each year.
Prof Klein appears to have taken figures from one cruise line in the US and then extrapolated them across all cruise companies and markets. The figures he has come up with do not match our passengers’ experience and cannot be applied to P&O Cruises.
P&O Cruises has introduced many changes to its operations, especially in passenger service, safety and security since 2005.
Those changes, which accelerated after the start of the inquest into the tragic death of Mrs Brimble, were described by Counsel assisting the Coroner as ‘a complete reform of the cruise industry insofar as P&O is concerned’.
We have learnt a lot over the past five years, and we are absolutely determined to draw on these experiences for ways to continue to improve.
Our responsibility is to create an environment onboard our ships where we do all we can to make sure people are safe, that behaviour is appropriate and our passengers enjoy their holiday. Our next concern is how we respond if people don’t behave appropriately, regardless of what we do to try to prevent such behaviour.
We have put in place a range of safeguards to try to ensure what happened to Mrs Brimble cannot happen again and we will continue this commitment.
