(C) OpenDemocracy This story was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Investigation reveals extent of sexual abuse in the armed forces [1] [] Date: 2024-06 Ingrained misogyny In the years between the two unreported rapes and her 2014 sexual assault, Jane faced a campaign of sexist bullying by colleagues, which she said is not unusual for women in the armed forces. “It’s classed as normal,” she said. “They would give me fake orders, unlawful orders, because I was a woman. I would be given an order to commit suicide overnight, then I’d be punished the next day for not following orders.” The punishments ranged from verbal abuse to explicit sexual bullying. Jane recalled working in a hangar when she “was told to get on the floor naked… I said no, but then I’d disobeyed an order. When the commanding officer came down, he went after me for disobeying an order.” On another occasion, she said, “they put me in a cage, in the middle of the hangar, where we would keep equipment, cleaning materials, things like that. All these men were prowling around outside, but I had to go in, to follow orders.” openDemocracy put these examples to the MoD, but were told it does not comment on individual cases. Zoe Jackson from Aurora, a charity that provides specialist sexual and domestic abuse support to members of the forces, told openDemocracy that the military’s hierarchical nature can lead to abuse. “There is a command and control culture, there has to be because you are trained to follow orders, so you can go into battle together,” Jackson explained. “But where there are power dynamics, there are people who will exploit that.” One former member of the army reserves, who wished to remain anonymous, asked openDemocracy, “if this is how they are treating their own colleagues, how are they treating women in war zones? How are they treating civilian women abroad?” During our investigation, openDemocracy found online discussions – which we have corroborated with women veterans – about a practice at social events where attendees must remove their clothes at the command “naked bar”. “There’s a lot of stuff that goes on that you don’t hear about and you don’t want to hear about,” said Jane. “But it’s acceptable within the military.” Paula Edwards, the founder of the charity Salute Her said serving personnel boasted about using sex workers, including an incident where men shaved a sex worker. A British Medical Journal report noted an ‘initiation’ that sees new recruits stationed in Kenya made to flip a coin to decide if they can use a condom when paying a local woman for sex. That men sitting on court martial boards are steeped in this culture shows that “investigations into sexual offences within the military need to be independent”, said Edwards. To further understand who might serve on a court martial board, openDemocracy looked at the Army Rumour Service (ARRSE) – an unofficial online forum for current and former members of the British Army. Because the forum uses pseudonyms, it is not possible to identify its members. openDemocracy found numerous instances of members who said on forum threads that they had sat on court martial boards, and who on separate threads made misogynistic comments and spoke dismissively about sexual assault. These included jokes about handcuffing a woman to a bed; derogatory comments on women’s breasts and genitals, and sexual comments about female celebrities. In a thread about Colonel Martin Toney, who was found guilty of sexually assaulting a fellow officer in 2021 and dismissed from the army without any criminal punishment, a forum member expressed his concern that the assault “was hardly the crime of the century” and had “hurt nothing but the woman’s feelings”. Toney’s conviction, he said, was “grossly unfair”. The poster claimed to have sat on a court martial board. It is not known which court martials the members sat on, and there is no evidence to suggest they judged sexual offences cases. The comments, however, reveal the military’s misogynistic culture permeates the senior-most ranks, including those tasked with judging what does and doesn’t constitute serious gender crimes such as rape and sexual assault. This atmosphere of normalised misogyny has raised concerns about the safety of young recruits. The Conservative Party has announced it will bring in National Service for 18-year-olds if it wins the general election on 4 July, which would bring an additional 30,000 teenagers into the armed forces each year. “That’s a lot of young people who don’t necessarily have a barometer of what's normal, when it comes to consent,” said Jackson, from Aurora. “You’ve then got those young people all living and working together, there is a drinking culture, and there is a rank structure and hierarchy which brings with it power dynamics that can be misused. What looks to those young people as fine and consensual, might actually be exploitative. It is a potential safeguarding nightmare." The MoD introduced a zero tolerance policy for unacceptable sexual behaviour in 2022. A culture of silence Georgia Hinton waived her right to anonymity after being raped by a soldier in 2018, when she lived on a military base in Gloucestershire with her serving ex-wife and daughter. The trauma of the attack left Hinton feeling unsafe in her own home. Though the rapist, Serupepeli Niubasaga, was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison after she reported the attack to civilian police, Hinton says she found the military obstructive in her search for justice. “The military closes ranks,” she said. “And that’s why I spoke out. It’s very difficult reporting a crime like rape on a military base. Everyone knows each other personally, they all live and work together. “How can you report a rape to the chain of command, when the rapist might be their best friend? There’s no one there who is removed from life in the base, no one who can be independent.” Hinton later learnt that her friends in the military had been criticised for encouraging her to report the assault to the civilian, rather than the military justice system. “They were told that we should have kept it in-house, and that was a shock to me at the time,” she said. “It became very apparent that they wanted it quietly dealt with. And I won’t be quiet about it.” Hinton was not in the military, but Jackson from Aurora said this culture of silence may lead to servicewomen not reporting crimes for fear of damaging their careers. “Women are concerned about the implications of speaking out,” she told openDemocracy. “Whether they will be believed, whether they will get into trouble, whether they will miss out on promotions.” Offences such as rape and sexual assault are crimes whether the accused is in the military or not. Victims – including serving personnel – therefore have the right to report to the military or the civilian police. A 2011 protocol states that there should be “consultation” between the CPS and the SPA “regarding the appropriate jurisdiction” for an alleged sexual offence by a member of the armed forces that took place in the UK. However, Freedom of Information requests made to the director of public prosecutions (DPP) by openDemocracy, and a previous request made by the NGO Liberty, found the DPP holds “no recorded information … where the DPP has been called upon by the Director of Service Prosecutions to make a decision regarding jurisdiction”. The MoD confirmed decisions are made on a case-by-case basis. In 2021, Hinton launched a petition on the House of Commons website to require civilian police to handle all military sexual assault claims. This did not receive the 100,000 signatures required to force a parliamentary debate and, like all other such petitions, was closed when Parliament was dissolved last month ahead of the general election. An MoD spokesperson said: “we have established the Defence Serious Crime Command and Victim Witness Care Unit to provide specialist support to victims and witnesses of serious crime, independently from the military chain of command. “Sexual assault and other sexual offences are not tolerated in the Armed Forces and we are prioritising stamping them out. We have made significant changes to how incidents are reported and investigated including the introduction of a new app which allows personnel to raise and track concerns online.” Post-trauma Jane finally left the forces in 2018, following a medical discharge. “They wanted to get rid of me, and by that point I was happy to go,” she said. “I had depression and trauma,” Jane continued. Medical records seen by openDemocracy show she was struggling with PTSD symptoms including flashbacks and nightmares. “But they also accused me of being delusional, of being deranged and psychotic.” More women leave the armed forces each year than join, with the MoD’s biannual diversity statistics showing they are more likely than men to be medically discharged, in part because of a higher presentation of mental health reasons than their male colleagues. While serving in conflict zones is a leading cause of mental health issues such as PTSD, women are also more likely to experience a second leading cause: sexual violence. Women who are raped by military colleagues experience “institutional betrayal,” said Salute Her’s Nicole Dodds. “The rape or assault is one trauma, then the institutional betrayal is a second trauma.” Research from the US found that female veterans reporting military sexual trauma were nine times more likely to be diagnosed with PTSD compared with female veterans with no history of sexual assault. Six years after walking off the base and binning her uniform, Jane is receiving palliative care for cancer. “It’s a bit rubbish, my life, I’ll give you that,” she said. Since Jane left, the MoD has launched a new strategy for tackling sexual offending, including new training on unacceptable behaviours. “I was able to speak out,” Jane finished. “And the Navy didn’t like me speaking out. I was meant to be subservient, in a place where sexual assault is normalised. They wanted to control everything, to control me – because if they can’t control everything, it impacts their reputation. That’s what the Navy cares about, above all. Protecting its reputation.” “The MoD – and hence the military – has a problem with being very defensive, it has an obsession with reputation and process,” agreed RAF veteran and academic Sophy Antrobus. “The good thing is that more women are speaking out. But to change the culture takes a strategic shock. “This is not going to be fixed in one or two years, but if there is political will, if this is made a political priority, it can change for the better.” [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/investigation-extent-sexual-abuse-british-military-rape-women-failed/ Published and (C) by OpenDemocracy Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/