Child-friendly resorts, calm beaches and beautiful turquoise waters have made the Caribbean a paradise for generations of American holidaymakers.
But many of the most popular islands visited by 17million US tourists per year are seeing a wave of murders, robberies and shocking sexual assaults.
Violent crime has gotten so bad the State Department has put a level 3 travel warning on Jamaica – the same rating given to war-torn Gaza – urging travelers to reconsider visiting.
This week, officials raised the alert for Grenada due to rising crime, putting it on par with The Bahamas, which has been at Level 2 since 2024. There is also growing concern over Turks and Caicos, a longtime celebrity-favorite destination, where violent crime is similarly spiking.
Alicia Stearman wants the horror she experienced on a family vacation to the Bahamas as a teenager to be a cautionary tale for US parents.
At 16, she was abducted while alone outside her four-star hotel, taken by boat to an abandoned island and brutally raped inside a dilapidated shed.
Her attacker told her that if she ever told anyone, he would come for her and her family and kill them.
‘I have flashbacks. I have triggers, and I am still traumatized,’ she told the Mail.
Alicia Stearman was brutally raped in the Bahamas and wants her story to be a cautionary tale
Predators and criminals even operate in resorts like the Atlantis hotel in Paradise Island, where
Stearman, now 45, from California, is urging American parents to beware when visiting the island and broader Caribbean.
‘People need to realize the risk they put their children in when they are unaware and how horrible people really are and that they could be their last prey.’
In 2024, the US State Department reissued an advisory telling Americans traveling to the Bahamas to ‘exercise increased caution’ due to a wave of violent crime.
Travelers were even advised to be vigilant in resorts.
Stearman, a mother-of-two and the owner of a thriving non-profit, said she was abducted by a man in his 40s outside her hotel in Nassau, on New Providence Island.
The man claimed to be a parasailing instructor and seemed friendly enough, asking her if she wanted to go for a quick ride on the boat.
He said: ‘We are going to stay right here [in the nearby water]. Right here in front of the room. I naively thought he was telling the truth.’ But when she got inside the boat, and it picked up speed and began heading out to sea, at which point Stearman she knew she had made a terrible mistake.
Stearman was taken to this barren island at knifepoint and told to cooperate or die
The empty shed Stearman held in for hours and brutally raped
‘He said it can go two ways. I can kill you and throw you in the ocean, no one is ever going to know what happened to you, or you could cooperate.’
She thought at the time: ‘I am about to die. I tried to be compliant and tried not to die. That is all I could think about is ‘do what this person says. I just don’t want to die.’
She recalled that he put cocaine on a knife towards her nose and told her to take it or he would slit her throat.
He then took her to an uninhabited island and forced her into a ‘hollowed-out shed.’
‘He brutally raped me for eight hours,’ she said as she wept, reliving the horror. ‘He had a bag of drugs, condoms, and sex toys and all those horrible things.’
Smiling teenaged Alicia taken on a separate family vacation
Alicia the day of the horrific sexual abuse in August 1995 at Nassau
The horrific attack happened in 1996 and for years Stearman kept it private out of fear the police would not take her seriously.
Overall sexual assaults in the first half of 2025 were down on the previous year (87 vs 125) – but victims like Stearman believe many go unreported.
She returned to the island in 2017 over 20 years later looking for answers – and claims she was dismissed by police.
‘I felt like they were trying to intimidate me to not file a report and used all these different tactics by embarrassing me and shaming me,’ she said, ‘But I was determined.’ She claims police dismissed her claims.
The Daily Mail also spoke to victims of other crimes on their dream Caribbean vacations.
Sophia Molnar, who travels six months a year for her travel blog, The Always Wanderer, called her trip to the Dominican Republic ‘the scariest experience of my life.’
Sophia Molnar went for a quick swim on the Caribbean beach and all her valuables were stolen
She has visited more than 30 countries, but nothing compared to what happened four years ago.
Molnar and her partner had all their personal belongings stolen from the beach -camera, phones, credit cards, hotel keys, even their clothes.
The only device they had left was an iPad. Using the Find My app, they tracked one of the stolen iPhones to a black market.
Yet the nightmare didn’t end there. The following night, Molnar said she woke to robbers trying to break into their hotel room. They barricaded the door.
She claimed they had to buy back their phone from corrupt police for $200 but were unable to retrieve their other items.
Molnar said she would never return to the Caribbean.
