A Female Royal Navy Sailor Found Guilty of Repeated Sexual Assaults on Warship Crew
Royal Navy sailor reportedly He was found guilty of multiple sexual assault charges after a court-martial was told he repeatedly groped fellow sailors on a warship over two years and targeted both men and women.
Able Seaman Sian Dowsett, 25, was found guilty of six of seven sexual assaults following a trial at Bulford Martial Court in Wiltshire.
The offenses were committed over two years between 2023 and 2024 while he was serving on the warship HMS Dauntless, a Type 45 destroyer based in Portsmouth.
Prosecutors told the court Dowsett subjected four sailors, two men and two women, to a series of sexual assaults, including touching the male sailors’ crotches, fondling their arms and making obscene remarks such as “I like my coffee the way I like my big, strong men.”
Prosecutors told the court Dowsett also groped female sailors, slapped their buttocks and squeezed their breasts, asking, “You like that, girl?” He said that he said obscene words such as.
Closing the prosecution, Graham Coombes told the court: “The defendant is strong, confident, has an intimidating personality, wanders around the ship, sexually assaulting people he likes.”
A summary of his closing statement described how Dowsett’s crimes followed a pattern of “nipple pinching, butt slapping and genital grabbing”.
Mr Coombes told the court Dowsett appeared to select new female sailors and male sailors who he thought would not report crimes.
“He chose people who he thought would not report him,” he told the court.
Mr Coombes rejected Dowsett’s claim that he had been slandered by witnesses, saying: “Ten witnesses gave evidence against him.”
“These are serious allegations, not trivial,” he told the court.
“Would they really do this?”
The male sailor told investigators that Dowsett slapped his ass in the ship’s galley, leaving the sailor “stunned” just a few weeks after starting duty. The sailor said he decided not to report the incident because he didn’t want to create tension on the long voyage, but also because he doubted his chain of command would take the complaint seriously.
The sailor said that the events were continuing and asked Dowsett to tell him that he would report him if they continued. Under police interview, the sailor said: “To be honest, he’s kind of suffering from cancer on the ship. It’s affecting my morale, it’s affecting my personal relationship with him, so yeah, it’s affecting me quite a bit, yeah.”
“It’s just disrespect. Real lack of respect. It’s going to get worse. He’ll go to another ship and do the same thing again.”
On another occasion, the court heard, Dowsett touched the sergeant’s breasts and fondled her nipples while the woman was changing. The petty officer said the incident was unwanted and made him uncomfortable, but he was not friends with Dowsett.
Other accounts of the events were also heard, including one in which Dowsett repeatedly pinched a male sailor’s nipple during class and then grabbed the sailor’s genitals after deployment. The newly appointed female sailor also testified that Dowsett slapped her buttocks painfully hard several times while commenting on her body.
During police interrogation, Dowsett said he was heterosexual but had bisexual tendencies.
The court-martial was told this was a pattern of behavior employed against several different victims.
Dowsett will be sentenced at a later date.
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