Is the world's deadliest profession also among the most violent?

The following story is based on material from the first episode of a new podcast series, The Outlaw Ocean, released by the CBC and the Los Angeles Times. Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Crimes like this don't often happen on land. A 10-minute, slow-motion slaughter captured by a cellphone camera shows a group of unarmed men at sea, flailing in the water, shot and killed one by one, after which the culprits pose for celebratory selfies.

For human rights lawyers and ocean advocates, the only thing more shocking than the footage was the government inaction that followed.

The case shows the challenge of prosecuting crimes on the high seas and the reason violence offshore often occurs with impunity. There were at least four ships at the scene that day, but no law required any of the dozens of witnesses to report the killings — and no one did.

Authorities learned of the killings only when the video turned up on a cellphone left in a taxi in Fiji in 2014. It's still unclear who the victims were or why they were shot.

An unknown number of similar killings take place each year — deckhands on the ship from which the video was shot later said they'd witnessed a similar slaughter a week before.

The number of deaths at sea — including killings — remain extremely hard to assess. The typical estimate has been around 32,000 casualties per year, making commercial fishing among the most dangerous professions on the planet. A new estimate is more than 100,000 fatalities per year — or more than 300 a day,  according to research produced by the Fish Safety Foundation and funded by the Pew Charitable Trust.

"Reasons for this significant loss of life include the lack of a comprehensive safety legislative framework and co-ordinated approaches to promoting safety at sea in the fishing sector," a recent report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said.

But the United Nations, which tracks fatalities by profession, does not indicate how many of these deaths are due to avoidable accidents, neglect or violence.

Brutality in distant-water fishing fleets — and the connection to forced labour on these vessels — has been an open secret for a while. A report released in May by the University of Nottingham's Rights Lab showed, for example, that migrant workers on British fishing ships were systematically overworked and underpaid; more than a third of the workers said they experienced severe physical violence.

In 2020, a team of researchers used satellite data tracking of about 16,000 fishing ships to estimate how many people were at risk of being subject to forced labour, based on criteria defined by the UN International Labour Organization. Up to a quarter, or roughly 100,000 people, were at high risk, according to the study, published in the journal PNAS.

Steve Trent, the director of the Environmental Justice Foundation, said that his staff interviewed 116 Indonesian crew members who worked on fishing vessels from China, which has the world's largest distant-water fishing fleet. Roughly 58 per cent had seen or experienced physical violence, the organization found.

LISTEN | Ian Urbina talks to The Current about the crimes committed on the high seas:

Addressing such violence and other brutal conditions in commercial fishing is difficult in large part because so little data is captured or provided to the public. And since problems are often only countered when they are seen and counted, this research shortfall is a major barrier to regulating the industry.