Teenage Girls Serving in British Army Report Record Levels of Sexual Assault

Authored by vice.com and submitted by dogsrunnin
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The revelations come as the British Armed Forces actively seeks to recruit more women into its ranks, advertising enticing careers in the Navy and talking about gender equality in its ranks, despite ignoring the key recommendations of a report into abuse against women serving in the military.

There was a tenfold rise in the number of reports of minors being subjected to sexual assaults and rape, from 1 in 2015 to 10 last year, Freedom of Information requests from think tank Child Rights International Network (CRIN) show. Over the past year, this number increased almost fivefold. In this year’s figures, 47 teenagers under 18 have been identified by military police as victims of sexual assault and rape, including 37 girls and 10 boys, UK Defence Minister Leo Docherty told Parliament . There are only 240 girls of this age currently signed up - there were 290 during the period of the attacks - meaning more than 1 in 10 girls enlisted has said they have been assaulted.

The experiences of the people who have chosen to share their stories for the first time are consistent with the limited data made available by the UK’s Ministry of Defence. Most of the attacks took place when the teens were new recruits or in their first few years in the military, and very few led to any kind of prosecution. The UK is the only major military power – and one of only 16 countries in the world – to enlist from age 16, with the youngest people the most vulnerable to abuse.

Detailing devastating failures in military leadership, the military police and military prosecuting authorities in the aftermath of attacks, they say they are finally speaking out on behalf of young people who are currently serving in the Armed Forces.

She was eventually forced to report her commanding officer, after she “flipped out” at him when he refused her holiday request, and another senior officer became involved. He was investigated and court-martialled. Her documents show the initial charges of indecent assault and sexual harassment were downgraded into one sexual harassment charge. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a reduction of rank and a six-month detention in military prison.

“​​I would say 75 percent of it was always done in front of people. He was the sergeant, so it's not like anyone could say anything.” She began drinking heavily, and at one point she took an overdose of painkillers and very nearly died.

Army Corporal R, 39, a veteran who completed two tours of Afghanistan, is a survivor of military abuse. She joined the cadets at 13 and went straight from there into the Army at 17. It started with harassment; taunts of “big tits” from her commanding officer that she was encouraged to dismiss as “just banter”, which progressed into a two-year campaign of sexual assault and harassment.

Despite a lot of zero-tolerance promises to crack down on the problem from leaders across the Royal Navy, RAF and the Army, this year in the Army more enlisted women than ever before reported being victims of what is described as a “particularly upsetting experience”. This can mean bullying, unwanted dick pics, sexual touching or an attack. Thirty-five percent of women in the Army’s Sexual Harassment Survey , conducted by the MoD and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, reported being subjected to abuse of this nature. This is up 20 percent from the last time women were surveyed, in 2018.

Over 4,700 female service personnel out of the 20,000 women surveyed in the research responded and its large scale gives some useful indication of how common assaults are, but the language used can be imprecise, says Emma Norton, lawyer and founder of the Centre for Military Justice. “When you look at what a number of those upsetting experiences were, another word for that would be sexual assaults.” In the UK civilian population last year, 3.2 percent of women were sexually assaulted.

Assault is a “clear and present danger” for those who enlist, says Norton, but what happens next is often more traumatising. “The young women that contact us describe being demonised, ostracised and treated as if they are the problem,” she told VICE World News. Norton claims military police have proven themselves unfit to prosecute any kind of sexual assault crime, and should therefore have no place working with underage victims. “A lack of expertise in how to respond to allegations of sexual assaults at all causes very serious harm and more trauma,” she said.

In a statement to VICE World News, a Ministry of Defence spokesperson said they did not comment on individual cases: “The Armed Forces take any allegation of rape or sexual assault very seriously. Serving today is a very different experience to how it was 20 years ago, but we continue to make important changes to stamp out all unacceptable behaviours”.

Twenty-two of the 47 victims of abuse were attending AFC Harrogate, a hybrid boarding school and training centre for underage recruits, when the attacks took place. Of the 22 reports of assault at AFC Harrogate, three of those accused are staff at the facility, Docherty revealed.

The report by Sarah Atherton MP, who was parliamentary private secretary to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and led the inquiry, recommended that military police be stripped of the responsibility for policing sexual assault and rape and that it should be handed to the civilian police, given their relative levels of expertise. The fact that it’s been another record-breakingly bad year for UK civilian police and prosecuting authorities, with just 1.3 percent of recorded rapes resulting in a charge, highlights how bad the situation is. The government ignored Atherton’s advice.

The inquiry was the first time in UK parliamentary history that serving soldiers, sailors and airwomen were ungagged and permitted to testify. An unprecedented number took part: 4,200 serving and veteran women, mostly anonymously. Sixty-four percent of veterans and 58 percent of women currently serving said they experienced bullying, harassment and discrimination. Six in ten said they did not report what happened. Of those who did, a third said the experience was “extremely poor”.

Among these measures is the plan to double the number of women joining the Armed Forces over the next eight years, so that women will make up 30 percent of personnel by 2030. Currently, women make up just over 11 percent.

The MoD told VICE World News: “In November 2021, we set out a comprehensive set of measures to improve the experience of women in the Armed Forces. This included ensuring that complaints of bullying, harassment or discrimination are now dealt with by someone outside an individual’s chain of command, and strengthening the levers available to dismiss or discharge anyone who has committed a sexual offence.”

Jean Macdonald enlisted in 1977 and was part one of the first battalion of female Army fitness instructors permitted to train with the men, a proud member of the Women’s Royal Army Corps. It’s taken her 40 years to begin to talk openly about what happened to her. “They said we were ‘Wracs’ - which stood for ‘weekly ration of army cunt’.”

Lyons also put on the public record that as of 2020, there were seven men on the UK sex offenders register who continue to serve across the RAF, Army and Navy. For safeguarding reasons, in the civilian world there are strict rules on how convicted sex offenders can interact with under 18s. In the Army, almost a quarter of recruits are of this age. But the bigger problem for victims, as well as anyone considering joining, is the unknown number of unregistered sex offenders currently operating within the ranks and the military culture that allows them to thrive.

In 2020, an independent judicial review led by Lord Justice Lyons described the rate of prosecutions of sexual assaults by military police as “astonishingly low”. Among the many shortcomings identified, he found the Royal Navy ships he inspected – an unknown number of which are currently mobilised in NATO exercises in response to the war in Ukraine – have no capacity to investigate reports of rape or sexual assault. He found no rape kits on board, and no one medically trained in how to take evidence in a manner that would meet prosecution standards of proof.

Though women have served in the Army from World War II – with Queen Elizabeth II enlisting as an 18-year-old princess – Macdonald’s experiences from this period are eye-popping. She was first sexually assaulted during her first Army medical when she was 19.

Things came to a head when Atherton resigned her ministerial position as she couldn’t vote with the government on the Armed Forces Bill in December last year, because it ignored the recommendations of the Defence Committee inquiry she led and kept the responsibility for policing sexual crime with military police instead of handing it over to the civilian police. “I felt a duty to the women who had put their faith in me and the Defence Committee, to stand by the recommendation that murder, manslaughter and rape cases should be primarily heard in civilian courts,” Atherton told VICE World News. “Given the evidence I received, my resignation was a matter of principle.”

Women started speaking more openly about their experiences in the military a few years ago, after the publication of Former Lieutenant Colonel Diane Allen’s 2018 book, Forewarned. But by opening the Atherton inquiry, allowing and inviting their participation by lifting the gagging order that normally prevents members of the Armed Forces giving evidence of this nature, and then failing to actually implement its recommendations, servicewomen feel very let down by the MoD.

Recently, reading the doctor’s fawning obituary, she learned he lived to the age of 100 and his “illustrious career” lasted a lot longer than hers. “How many girls would he have had over those 16 years?” she said. “For so long I just couldn’t stop thinking of all those young girls going to him for their medical when they first joined.”

LP, a senior aircraftswoman who is now 45 but joined the RAF when she was just 16, was one of the thousands of people who contributed to the inquiry. On her second internal posting, she was assaulted along with the only other woman on her base in a remote part of England. “We were tied up with tie wraps on wrists and put in a cage which was used to store signed-for goods. We had bags of water thrown at us. I was also once locked up in a wagon, tie-wrapped to a metal pallet and ended up at another military base in Yorkshire in the back of a curtain-sided lorry,” she told VICE World News.

She recently received £3,000 in compensation after a war pension tribunal case for injuries received while serving, which she said validated her experience as a victim for the first time.

Singmetosleep123 on July 22nd, 2022 at 06:04 UTC »

“47 teenagers under 18 have been identified by military police as victims of sexual assault and rape, including 37 girls and 10 boys, UK Defence Minister Leo Docherty told Parliament. There are only 240 girls of this age currently signed up - there were 290 during the period of the attacks - meaning more than 1 in 10 girls enlisted has said they have been assaulted.”

Wow. Literally what career comes with a 10 percent chance of being sexually assaulted?

FormalWare on July 21st, 2022 at 22:51 UTC »

The Canadian armed forces took the investigation of sexual assault and harassment allegations out of the military police's hands, a while back; this is apparently now the recommendation for the UK forces.

autotldr on July 21st, 2022 at 22:00 UTC »

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 97%. (I'm a bot)

A record number of teenage girls under the age of 18 serving in the British military have reported being sexually assaulted and raped while training in the last year, VICE World News can reveal.

Her documents show the initial charges of indecent assault and sexual harassment were downgraded into one sexual harassment charge.

The report by Sarah Atherton MP, who was parliamentary private secretary to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and led the inquiry, recommended that military police be stripped of the responsibility for policing sexual assault and rape and that it should be handed to the civilian police, given their relative levels of expertise.

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