Sexual harassment in the military
Sexual harassment in the military is unwanted sexual behaviour experienced as threatening, offensive, or otherwise upsetting, which occurs in a military setting.[2][3][4][5]
Sexual harassment is more common in military than civilian life.[3][6] Military women and men experience unwanted behaviours disproportionately,[3][4][7][8][9][10] particularly younger women and girls.[4][11][12][13][14][15] Other groups at high risk include partners of personnel, child cadets, and military detainees.
Risk factors characteristic of a military setting include the young average age of personnel, isolated workplaces, the minority status of women, hierarchical power relationships, a culture of conformity, the predominance of traditionally masculine values and behaviours, and a heavy drinking culture.[4][10][16][17][18] Harassment is particularly common in certain settings, notably centres for initial military training[1][19][20][21][22] and theatres of war.[10][23][24]
Experience of harassment can be traumatic. It increases the risk of stress-related mental illness,[10] particularly post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).[6] Nonetheless, typically most of those targeted choose not to raise a formal complaint, expecting repercussions if they do.[3][4][7][9][12][13][25][26]
Despite the development of prevention programmes in recent years, official statistics in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States report increasing rates of sexual harassment in the military.[4][10][7][8][9][15]
Sexual harassment is unwanted sexual behaviour experienced as threatening or otherwise upsetting.[2][3][4][5] Definitions in use by state armed forces include:
Principal targets[edit]
Female personnel[edit]
While some male personnel are sexually harassed, women are much more likely to be targeted.[10][4][3][7][8][9]
Younger women and girls face a greater risk, according to American, British, Canadian, and French research.[11][12][4][13][14][15] For example, girls aged under 18 in the British armed forces were ten times as likely as adult female personnel to be the victim of a sexual offence in 2021.[14]
Intimate partners[edit]
In 2022, research in the UK armed forces found that experience of intimate partner violence (IPV), a category that includes sexual abuse, was three times more prevalent among partners of military personnel than among partners of civilians.[23] 10% of male and 7% of female personnel told the researchers they had abused their partner in the previous 12 months. The study found that physical and sexual abuse of partners was particularly common where personnel had traumatic experiences of war.
In the US armed forces, estimates of the sexual abuse of military partners indicate a similarly high rate of annual incidence, ranging from 12% to 40%.[32]
Child cadets[edit]
Cadet forces, common worldwide, are military youth organisations in communities and schools.[33][34][35][36] Some evidence from the UK, where hundreds of complaints of the sexual abuse of cadets have been recorded since 2012, and from Canada, where one in ten complaints of sexual assault in the military are from the cadet organisations, indicate that these institutions are susceptible to a culture of sexual harassment.[37][38][39][40][41]
Detainees[edit]
Individuals detained by militaries are particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment. During the Iraq War, for example, personnel of the U.S. Army and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) committed multiple human rights violations against detainees in Abu Ghraib prison,[42] including rape, sodomy, and other forms of sexual abuse.[43][44][45] Similarly, two Iraqi men detained on a Coalition warship at the start of the war were made to strip naked and were sexually humiliated.[46]
Prevalence[edit]
While prevalence varies by country, military branch, and other factors, official statistics and peer-reviewed research from Canada, France, the UK, and the US indicate that between a quarter and a third of military women in these countries are sexually harassed at work at least once each year.[47][48][49][50]
Military training settings are characterised by a particularly high level of sexual harassment and assault relative to both the civilian population and other military settings.[50][51][20][52][21]
Research further shows an increase in perpetration during and after deployment on military operations.[10][23][24]
Studies of sexual harassment have found that it is markedly more common in military than civilian settings[23][47][6] For example, between 2015 and 2020, girls aged 16 or 17 in the British armed forces were twice as likely as their same-age civilian peers to report rape or other sexual assault.[15]
Risk factors[edit]
Several reasons for a high prevalence of sexual harassment in the military have been suggested.
A Canadian study has found that key risk factors associated with military settings are the typically young age of personnel, the isolated locations of bases, the minority status of women, and the disproportionate number of men in senior positions.[10]
An emphasis in military organisations on conformity, obedience, and hierarchical power relations, combine to increase the risk, particularly to personnel of low rank, who are less able than others to resist inappropriate expectations made of them.[4]
Traditionally masculine values and behaviours that are rewarded and reinforced in military settings are also thought to play a role.[53][16][54][4][17]
In the UK, the 2019 Wigston Review into inappropriate sexual behaviours in the armed forces reported that several military factors contributed to risk: "tight-knit units that perceive themselves as 'elite'; masculine cultures with low gender diversity; rank gradients; age gradients; weak or absent controls, especially after extensive operational periods; and alcohol."[18]
Effects[edit]
Women affected by sexual harassment are more likely than other women to suffer stress-related mental illness afterwards.[10]
Research in the US found that when sexual abuse of female military personnel was psychiatrically traumatic, the odds of suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after deployment on operations increased by a factor of nine,[6] and the odds of suicide more than doubled.[55]
Research in the US has found that personnel affected by sexual harassment are somewhat less likely to develop depression or PTSD if a formal report leads to effective action to address the issue.[56]
The military leadership in some countries has begun to acknowledge a culture of sexual misconduct among personnel. For example:
Since the number of official complaints represents only a fraction of sexual harassment incidence, armed forces committed to reducing prevalence produce periodic estimates of its true extent by means of anonymised surveys.[3][8]
Other prevention initiatives, varying by country, include bystander and diversity training, and helplines.[9][50] Despite these steps, official statistics in Canada, the UK, and the US over the last decade show high and increasing rates of harassment.[47][49][50]
Sexual harassment in the military: country examples[edit]
Australia[edit]
Widespread reports of sexual harassment in the Australian armed forces led to the establishment of the Defence Abuse Response Taskforce to investigate complaints from women between 1991 and 2011. It received 2,439 complaints, of which it deemed 1,751 to be plausible.[25]
A Royal Commission into institutional child sexual abuse was established in 2012, which investigated widespread allegations of historical abuse in the navy.[1] The Commission took evidence from 8,000 individuals[61] and reported in 2017 that many recruits of both sexes and from the age of 15 had been repeatedly sexually abused by older recruits between 1967 and 1971, including by anal gang rape, and in some cases young recruits had been forced to rape each other.[1] The practice was "tolerated" by senior staff, according to the Commission.[62]