Piracy victims and PTSD: the untold story

Post traumatic stress disorder afflicting mariners attacked and held captive by pirates is barely a blip on the radar screen of press coverage.

It is very real and debilitating to its victims.

A typical reported story about pirate victims goes like this: Seafarer attacked. Seafarer kidnapped. Seafarer held hostage. Ransom paid. Seafarer released. Seafarer goes home. End of story.

To the seafarer, it’s not the end of story.

“Too many mariners victimized by pirates today remain traumatized for life, are unable to go back to sea, and instead of being one of their extended family’s breadwinners, are a liability,” said Michael Frodl, the founder and director of C-Level Maritime Risks, a Washington-based risk consultancy advising maritime industry interests.

According to numbers reported by the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), 62 seafarers have been killed in the past four years from incidents directly related to piracy in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden. Causes of death include deliberate murder, heart attack induced by the incident, suicide, drowning, disease and malnutrition.

There have been more than 3,500 mariners kidnapped and held hostage during the same period. Many of them were used as human shields, forced to operate pirate mother ships and subjected to “extreme mental as well as physical anguish,” said Giles Heimann, Chairman of the Save Our Seafarers Campaign.

Heimann detailed types of “horrific torture” inflicted on seafarers by pirates including:

-Being hung over the side of the ship by the ankles.
-Locked in the freezer hold.
-Cable ties tightened around genitals.
-Being savagely beaten, kicked and punched.

The trauma is so severe that many of these mariners will not go back to sea for a long time, if ever at all.

The victims’ families suffer as well, both during the long period of not knowing whether he or she will survive captivity and in adjusting to life with a person barely resembling the one they knew before, whose spirit is now broken, who may be subject to depression, bouts of despair, extreme anxiety and insecurity, paranoia, insomnia, startled responses, substance abuse, thoughts of suicide and fits of rage.

Dipendra Rathmore was held hostage for eight months as an Indian deck cadet aboard the Merida Marguerite. “They kept us in a state of terror—we were beaten constantly with metal poles,” Rathmore, 22, told reporter Diana Appleyard in an article appearing in The Guardian. “I saw my crewmates being thrashed with sticks and having electric probes attached to their genitals.”

“Even when I could not see the torturing, I could hear the screams. I can still hear the screams to this day.”

Seafarers have a history of PTSD well beyond the scope of piracy. We recently reported in our sister site The Maritime Lawyer about 41-year-old ex-tugboat crewman Scott Evans Dekraai, who gunned down eight persons in a California hair dressing salon last month.

Dekraai was seriously injured and permanently disabled while trying to save a female co-worker who ended up being killed in a tugboat accident a few years earlier. She was crushed when the tow bridle became taut. After the accident, he fell into depression and was diagnosed with PTSD. His marriage fell apart. He had a hard time finding work. There was a custody dispute with his ex-wife. His rage boiled over into his ultimate act of death and destruction.

“Our image wasn’t helped when, for a period of time, it seemed like every serial killer or whacko that gunned people down in a random act of violence was a merchant marine,” wrote Michael Rawlins in his book “The Last American Sailors.” There was George Hennard, who drove his truck into Luby’s Cafeteria in Texas in 1991, killing 21 and wounding 20 persons in the worst mass shooting in American history. He had been a seaman who had lost his papers. The infamous Richard Speck, who murdered eight women in the 1960s, was formerly a Great Lakes seaman. Retired merchant marine officer Lawrence Singleton raped and hacked off the forearms of a 15-year-old female hitchhiker in California in 1978.

Many hostage crisis management experts say that there’s too much focus on post event trauma and not nearly enough on preparing potential victims before they sail through high risk waters.

“More can be done by providing pre-captivity training to potential hostages, and that such can be done at more ‘bang for the buck’ than simply waiting for a tragedy to occur and then approach the problem," said Frodl. “That other approach, the current approach, we call the 'Humpty Dumpty' approach and like in the tale, it's not effective, and in the modern world, it's not cost-effective, which is just as bad if not more so.”