Abstract
This Symposium contribution assesses the ability of international law to evolve to offer essential protections for workers in an increasingly globalized world. It focuses on protections for women seafarers, specifically around gender-based violence and harassment on board vessels. Even though it is the world’s oldest transnational sector, seafaring remains overwhelmingly male-dominated. Consequently, international law was not initially conceived with women seafarers in mind. Now that women have broken into the maritime profession, they count on international law to evolve in kind. Notwithstanding, they continue to face sexist, if not violent, workplaces, and report high incidents of gender-based violence and harassment at sea.
The international organization responsible for adopting and supervising protections for workers, the International Labour Organization (ILO), has long prioritized the special needs of seafarers. Its Maritime Labor Convention, 2006, promised to ensure holistic protections for all women and men at sea and to quickly adapt with evolving sectoral challenges. A close look at the prevalence of gender-based violence and harassment at sea shows, however, that the ILO’s bureaucratic pathologies and interinstitutional processes preclude it from accomplishing that mission. The ILO’s failure to quickly respond to mounting evidence of that violence and harassment has broad implications for international law, which must absorb and respond to transnational work’s dynamic and fluctuating demands to remain useful and relevant.
Repository Citation
Desiree LeClercq,
Gender-Based Violence and Harassment at Sea
, 57 Cornell Int'l L.J. 99
(2024),
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/fac_artchop/1733
Originally uploaded at SSRN.