Bullying on Ships: What It Is, Your Rights, and How to Fight Back 2026

If a senior officer screams at you in the engine room, calls you a useless idiot in front of the whole crew, assigns you impossible tasks as punishment, or makes your life hell because you’re from a different state — you need to know something:

This is illegal. You have rights. And you can use them.

This guide tells you exactly what bullying is, what it isn’t, how to document it, and how to report it without ending your career.

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The Reality of Bullying in the Indian Maritime Industry

Research is unambiguous: bullying and harassment are more common on ships than in most shore-based workplaces. The reasons are structural:

• Hierarchy and authority: Senior officers have significant power over junior officers’ careers, including signing off TRBs (Training Record Books), giving employment references, and performance assessments
• Captive environment: You cannot leave. You cannot go home. You cannot take a break from the person harassing you
• Isolation: No HR department. No neutral party watching. No witnesses sometimes
• Cultural normalization: “That’s how the old man is” or “every ship is like this” — these phrases normalize what should not be normalized
• Fear of blacklisting: The most powerful suppressor of complaints

For Indian cadets and junior officers, an additional layer exists: regional discrimination, language-based exclusion, and caste dynamics that surface even in international crews.

The result is that a large number of incidents go unreported, the culture perpetuates, and people leave the industry — or worse.

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What Is Bullying vs What Is Just Hard Work

This distinction matters. If you’re going to complain, you need to be accurate about what you’re complaining about.

This is bullying / harassment:

• Verbal abuse: screaming insults, personal attacks, profanity directed at you personally
• Public humiliation: being ridiculed or degraded in front of the crew
• Discrimination: treatment based on your region, religion, language, caste, or ethnicity
• Threats: explicit threats to your career, physical threats, intimidation
• Punitive workload: excessive or degrading tasks assigned specifically as punishment
• Withholding shore leave as punishment without legitimate safety or operational reason
• Social exclusion: deliberate, systematic exclusion from crew activities, information, or communication
• Physical contact: any pushing, hitting, grabbing that is aggressive in nature
• Sexual harassment: unwelcome physical contact, sexual comments, pressure, or advances

This is demanding but legal:

• High work standards and being called out when you fail to meet them
• Blunt, direct feedback delivered harshly (tone can be unpleasant without being harassment)
• Long hours during genuine emergencies or port operations
• Being given difficult or undesirable tasks appropriate to your rank
• Not being praised or acknowledged
• Being required to follow orders you find inconvenient

The core distinction is whether your dignity is being attacked. Attacking your work performance is a supervisor’s job. Attacking you as a person is harassment.

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The Legal Framework: Your Rights

MLC 2006 — Regulation 4.3 (Health and Safety)

The Maritime Labour Convention requires that every flag state ensure ships have OSH (Occupational Safety and Health) programs that explicitly address harassment and bullying as health and safety hazards. This means:

• Bullying is officially categorized as a workplace safety issue, not just a management preference
• Companies have a legal obligation to prevent, investigate, and address it
• The obligation applies to all ships of ratifying countries (India has ratified MLC 2006)

ISM Code (International Safety Management Code)

The ISM Code requires every company to have a Safety Management System (SMS) with:

• Procedures for reporting unsafe conditions and non-conformities
• Designated Person Ashore (DPA) with direct access to the highest level of company management

Bullying creates an unsafe environment. It is a non-conformity. It belongs in the SMS complaint procedure.

ICS/ITF Guidance on Eliminating Shipboard Harassment and Bullying

This jointly published industry guidance defines harassment and bullying explicitly, provides examples, and establishes that conduct from verbal abuse to physical aggression falls under these definitions. P&I clubs have also published guidance linking bullying to safety incidents and recommending training and reporting channels.

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How to Document a Bullying Incident: Exact Method

Documentation is what separates a complaint that gets taken seriously from one that disappears.

Within hours of an incident, record:

1. Date and time (exact)
2. Location on ship (deck, engine room, accommodation, bridge)
3. Who was present (witnesses — names or ranks)
4. What was said or done — exact words, not a summary. “The Chief Engineer said ‘you are a fucking useless idiot from UP who should never have been given a cadet berth’” — not “the CE insulted me”
5. Your response, if any
6. How it affected your work — were you impaired on watch, did you make an error, did you avoid the area?

Where to keep this record:

• Personal phone notes, with timestamps
• Personal email to yourself (sent, so it has a timestamp)
• Personal notebook kept in your cabin — NOT in your official TRB or ship’s logbook
• NOT on the ship’s computer or server

Why the exact words matter: Vague complaints are vague targets. Exact documented quotes are specific facts that are hard to dismiss and hard to explain away.

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How to Report: Step by Step

Step 1: Use the Ship’s Complaint Procedure (If Safe To Do)

Under ISM Code, every ship must have a complaint procedure. Ask the Master or Safety Officer for it. If the Master is not the perpetrator, report there first. This creates a formal paper trail.

If the Master is the perpetrator, skip directly to Step 2.

Step 2: Report to the DPA in Writing

Every company has a Designated Person Ashore who has direct access to senior management and is specifically responsible for safety and welfare matters. Find the DPA contact from your employment contract or company SMS documents.

Write an email or letter: “I am formally reporting the following incidents under the company’s complaint procedure and MLC 2006 Regulation 4.3 obligations.”

List every documented incident. Keep a copy. Send with read receipt.

Step 3: Contact Your Union

NUSI (National Union of Seafarers of India) and FISI have experience in maritime harassment cases. They can advocate on your behalf, advise on the formal process, and escalate to ITF if needed.

Step 4: DG Shipping India

If the company DPA is unresponsive within a reasonable time (7-14 days for serious incidents):

DGS Grievance Redressal: 9004048406 | support.dgs@gov.in

DGS can take regulatory action against RPSL companies and Indian-flagged vessels.

Step 5: Port State Control

When the ship is in port, PSC inspectors have authority to board and investigate MLC non-conformities, including welfare and harassment complaints. Any port in any MLC ratifying country.

Step 6: ITF

International Transport Workers Federation inspectors are present in every major port. They have legally backed tools to intervene in cases of harassment, wage non-payment, and MLC violations.

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Protecting Yourself During the Process

The fear of retaliation is legitimate. It happens. Here is how to minimize the risk:

Use official channels only. Formal written complaints through proper channels are harder to dismiss and harder to use against you than informal complaints or social media posts.

Document any retaliation. If you face negative treatment after filing a complaint — changed work assignments, negative TRB entries, withheld shore leave — document it the same way you documented the original incident. Retaliation is itself a violation.

Do not confide in crew members who may report back. Find support outside the ship — union, Sailor Success, family.

Know that MLC 2006 explicitly protects complainants from retaliation. It is a violation for a company to punish a seafarer for making a complaint in good faith. Put this in your written complaint.

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The Mental Health Impact: Acknowledge It

Sustained bullying causes real psychological harm. Research links workplace bullying to anxiety, depression, sleep disturbance, somatic complaints (physical symptoms without medical cause), and in severe cases, PTSD.

If you are experiencing persistent low mood, inability to sleep, inability to concentrate at watch, or thoughts of self-harm — please reach out immediately:

• ISWAN 24hr Helpline: +44 20 7323 2737 (confidential, any issue)
• SailorGPT: sailorsuccess.online/sailorgpt (24/7, AI mentor trained for seafarer situations)
• Chief directly: +91 99581 10235 WhatsApp (confidential, real guidance)

Asking for help for mental health impact is not weakness. It is the correct response to an abnormal situation.

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What If You’re a Senior Officer Reading This?

The bullying culture damages the industry. Officers who were bullied as cadets and went on to bully their junior officers are perpetuating a cycle that costs the industry talent, creates accidents (research directly links psychological stress to reduced situational awareness and errors), and exposes companies to legal liability.

The most effective senior officers are not the ones who scream the loudest. They are the ones whose cadets actually learn, who build loyal crews, and who their companies trust with the most complex operations.

Fair, demanding leadership is not soft. It is technically superior.

If you are seeing bullying happen to crew members under your command — you have an MLC obligation to address it. And a professional obligation to be better than the officers who came before you.

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You Are Not Alone. Help Is Available.

If you are being bullied on your ship right now — you have options. The situation is not permanent. The contract ends. The ship changes. But what you do with this experience defines whether you leave the industry or build a career in it.

Use your rights. Document. Report through proper channels. Get support.

SailorGPT is available 24/7 for confidential guidance on exactly these situations.