“The bigger trauma has been everything I’ve been put through by my employer, ultimately by a department of the state.” A survivor tells 1843 magazine what it's like to report sexual assault in the armed forces
n a spring morning in 2014, Alicia woke up in her dormitory on her first day of basic training in the British armed forces. She was looking forward to getting to know the other regulars – camaraderie had been one of the things that appealed to her about a military career, the feeling of being part of a “big family”. After being issued with starched uniforms that felt like cardboard, the new recruits began their education.
In May 2015, after Alicia had finished the first stage of training, a female colleague reported in confidence to the military police that she had been raped by someone in her unit. It’s hard for anything to stay secret in a world where people eat, sleep, work and socialise together, and before long recruits were gossiping about the woman’s complaint. “Nobody really took the allegation seriously. It wasn’t that they didn’t think it happened.
A growing body of court cases, reports and testimonies from individuals in the forces indicates the scale of the problem. In 2012 Channel 4 News obtained details of an internal investigation in the British Army which suggested that all of the 400 women interviewed had received unwanted sexual attention and that many felt an “over-riding” lack of trust in the ability of senior officers to handle complaints about such concerns.
The stories go on. In 2014, Jennifer told her commanding officer that she’d been sexually assaulted in a car by a higher-ranking colleague. “Because I reported it, I was seen as an enemy of the Royal Navy. And then I was treated as such.” She says she was given extra duties and started to suspect that she was being punished for speaking up. She was also required to work in close proximity to her alleged attacker. “I kept asking to be moved and they refused every time.
Take the process for responding to accusations of rape and sexual assault. Until recently, it was perfectly normal for such allegations to be handled by someone who commanded both the victim and the alleged attacker . Only “very serious crimes’’ were to be handed to civilian police. Rape and sexual assault were not included
The strange dual system that developed persists to this day. Theoretically there’s nothing to stop service personnel from reporting a sexual crime to the civilian police. Some do so. But in practice, many have no idea that they can – the military runs the rest of their lives, so why not this? As a result, many sexual crimes are handled within the military justice system, even though over 95% of people in the British armed forces are based in Britain.
She gave written evidence for six hours in a dim, cramped room: “It felt like I was being interviewed in a cell” The deployment of women was vastly expanded during the second world war, though the new recruits still weren’t allowed to do anything as unladylike as kill someone: women were allowed to load shells into anti-aircraft guns but not to fire them.Sorry, your browser doesn't support HTML5 videos.The armed forces continued to employ a small number of women after 1945, usually as nurses or administrators in all-female units.
It is not just the overwhelmingly male composition of the top brass that makes the armed forces difficult for women, it’s also the complicated relationship the institution has with the rest of society. Christopher Dandeker, professor emeritus of war studies at King’s College London, notes that in liberal democracies the armed forces embody a problematic paradox.
Sometimes, the battle between corps culture and official nostrums plays out within the same person. In 2011, Graham House, then a wing commander in the Royal Air Force , received a call from a woman saying that an instructor leading a cadet training course on his base had raped her teenage daughter. “My first response to myself was, ‘I wish I didn’t pick up this problem’,” House told me. “My second response was, ‘It can’t be true’.
Three days before her 30th birthday, Ellement wrote “I’m sorry” on her mirror in lipstick. That night, she killed herself. The coroner ruled that bullying and the lingering trauma of the alleged crime contributed to her death. She’d imagined herself fighting a foreign enemy, united with her peers. Now it felt like the enemy was within
The following day she came back to the courthouse and waited to be summoned. Before long the judge announced he was throwing out her case. The prosecutor had failed to track down a key witness and he hadn’t provided the defence team with documents they’d requested weeks before. The ruling was also based on Alicia’s previous decision to withdraw the charge. The judge assumed – wrongly – that the prosecutor had informed Alicia that this decision could result in an acquittal.
Officials from the Service Prosecuting Authority formally apologised to Alicia, but rejected her subsequent request for all cases handled by this prosecutor to be reviewed.
But the complaints system was ineffective from the start, according to Ross McLeod, a former army officer. The army continued to “cover-up mistakes, bully personnel, victimise those who complain and harass those who are perceived to be ‘rocking the boat’, in order to protect the power and prestige of the chain of command”, he tolds in 2013.
However, the recommendation that rape cases be tried only in civilian courts was not included in the final bill that went before Parliament.
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