A failure of values, standards and leadership at all levels.

 

The British Army has six core values, which set out how a British soldier should act and conduct themselves. These values include:

·         COURAGE - Doing and saying the right thing not the easy thing

·         DISCIPLINE - Doing things properly and setting the right example

·         RESPECT FOR OTHERS- Treat others as you expect to be treated

·         INTEGRITY - Being honest with yourself and your teammates

·         LOYALTY - Support the army and your teammates

SELFLESS COMMITMENT Mates and mission first, me second

These are laudable values, and mirrored in the other two services in similar documents. They are rightly seen as a good ‘handrail’ to which all soldiers and professional military personnel should aspire to conduct themselves at all times.

Given this, when you read a report that talks of serving female personnel describing incidents like:

“Repeated sexual advances and unwanted attention from seniors”

“Bullying for refusing sexual advances”

“Filming and sharing images, including while in the showers”

“ Ejaculation into their pocket”

“Messes and mess accommodation being viewed as places of danger, with one servicewoman saying that they could be more dangerous for servicewomen than being deployed on overseas operations”

Bullying or downgraded performance assessment if servicewomen made attempts to report unacceptable behaviours

Then you realise that there is a very serious mismatch between aspiration and lived reality.

The publication of the House of Commons Defence Sub Committee report into the experience of women in the armed forces is both utterly vital, and absolutely appalling. It is hard to find words to describe the anger the author felt reading some of the accounts of women in the armed forces, and in particular the appalling experiences they have experienced.

What makes this report so significant is that permission was given, exceptionally, for women serving in the military to give evidence to the Committee. Roughly 10% of all serving female personnel responded to this report, which gives it significant credibility.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

This report should be mandatory reading, in full, for everyone in the chain of command, in the vain hope that it will be seen, read, acted on and positive changes made for the better. Sadly, one has to worry that it will instead be parked in a cul-de-sac marked “Irritating millennial wokeness” and given a stiff ignoring by a generation of people who want to go back to dreaming of manly wars fought by manly men (possibly even from a armoured vehicle that is less than 30 years old).

The response already has been depressing to read. A cesspit of toxic comments on social media about how “men get this too” and its all just a bit of PC gone mad. Other views seem to be that apparently the armed forces aren’t the civil service (in fact a cynic would argue that military levels officiousness and pointless bureaucracy is something some civil servants would dream of delivering), and that these silly girls need to wake up and understand that we’re in the terribly serious business of killing people here.

What is depressing is that were this report about the experiences of male officers or junior soldiers, one senses people would take it more seriously. If a report came out alleging that junior male recruits were gang raped, or forced into unwanted sexual activity, or given equipment that is unfit for purpose, then one gets the sense that something would be done about it.

If it was a foreign army and their female soldiers in a third world country, we’d be sending in FCDO Development advisors and military training teams to help them meet our standards and get them to the right page of the book. Yet somehow if its in the British military, it doesn’t count (banter yeah).

The fundamental problem with reading this report is that one is left feeling angry, upset and very let down at the culture that exists. Then one gets even crosser at the level of ‘head in sand’ responses that imply that this is something where what is needed is a really good Brigade Commanders study day to fix.

We should not be accepting of a report that turns around and identifies that 62% of female service personnel have been the victims of sexual harassment or discrimination. We should not be tolerant of a culture where, according to the report, “women are expected to be honorary blokes”.

The same tired ‘world class leadership training’ line gets trotted out over and over again at places like Sandhurst and Dartmouth. Yet this leadership training seems to continue to generate legions of male officers who have presided over a culture where women are not seen as truly their equal. There is something fundamentally rotten in the culture of a system where women feel scared to go into a mess, or report men trying to get into their room.

Its not just ‘lads games’ or ‘banter’ – on what planet is it ever defensible for a colleague to make unwanted advances into a females accommodation against her wishes? How is this tolerated and why is more not done to end this sort of practise. It speaks volumes that when complaints are made, the report highlights they can take years to do, or that when the alleged culprit is posted away the complaint is quietly dropped.

Report examples of treatment to female personnel

In the last 12 months 11% of female service personnel reported experiencing sexual harassment at work, compared to less than 1% of male personnel. This means that women are 10 times more likely to be sexually harassed than men, but hey, apparently its all good because according to social media, men get harassed too don’t you know?

There is no doubt that the military is a robust aggressive and tough culture, It is one where people rely intimately on each other and put their lives in each others hands, at times quite literally. There is a strong ‘weeding out, accepting in’ process akin to selection and acceptance in a tribe, to ensure that you have proven yourself worthy of a place in the team.

At times this can be intimidating to anyone new – much like boarding school or prison, arrival in the armed forces is about hiding your fear and showing that you’ve got what it takes to fit in and belong. Not everyone will make it, but this is what makes the group more insular still.

There is no doubt that this sense of shared values and teamwork strengthens the fighting bonds between people – but there is a line to be drawn. All too often in this report it is clear that the acceptable face of integration has been long passed by, and that female personnel are being subjected to processes, rituals and treatment that are not only utterly at odds with military values, but also at times potentially illegal too.

This is not about arguing that women should be given special treatment, or that they should somehow get a free pass for some things. No, it is about arguing that women should have a reasonable expectation of equal treatment in all respects – not just on an exercise in a muddy slit trench, but also back home in barracks, when they know they can take a hot shower without being covertly filmed for a squaddie to masturbate over later.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

More widely it is about arguing that women should have a reasonable expectation that the equipment they are issued with is fundamentally fit for purpose. Its 18 years since OP TELIC began, and still the Army is regarded by some as the organisation that delivered boots which fell apart in the sand for male soldiers. 

Yet, barely a word is said that after decades of women being ever closer to, or on the front line, they’ve yet to get body armour that fits the female form. Apparently though, it’s a male thing too, so calm down girls, you’re getting all hormonal and over excited at the prospect of wanting kit designed to fit you.

It is depressing in the extreme that the system has failed to capitalise on this and tried to find ways to get kit that fits. This isn’t PC gone mad to design body armour that is wearable by people with breasts, it’s a fundamental health and safety issue.

One only has to recall the urgency with which body armour additions were developed to protect mens testicles and penis on OP TELIC and HERRICK when the IED threat increased. Why has a similar sense of urgency not been applied to womens armour issues? Maybe the designers are naïve enough to think that breasts function as airbags, so women don’t need the protection in the first place.

Speaking of protection, its equally depressing to read of the ongoing inability of the British Armed Forces to accept that half of the population are biologically designed to naturally bleed for a few days roughly every four weeks. Or that there are means of preventing damage to underwear called ‘sanitary protection’.

Its genuinely shocking to read that in this day and age female British soldiers on exercise have had to improvise emergency sanitary towels using socks, due to a lack of product availability. That they were hospitalised for long kidney damage and urinary tract infections as a result is even more appalling.

Its not ‘PC gone mad’ to provide basic hygiene supplies for people on exercise. Its called ‘logistics’. Yet when the news broke that the armed forces were going to provide basic sanitary supplies if required, the legion of angry white men on social media (clearly hugely experienced users of said products judging by the amount of dripping they were doing), who felt that they were able to offer expert advice was unbelievable.

At its most basic, if we as a modern military are unable to have an objective conversation about providing loo paper, shaving foam and sanitary towels to our soldiers without giggling or acting as if the Army is collapsing, then perhaps its time to ask if we are as good as we like to make out.

This isn’t complicated stuff – this is the basics, the absolute basics, yet its clear that it is going badly wrong. Whats even more worrying reading the report is how difficult it is for female service personnel to try to raise concerns or be listened to by others.

70% of Army personnel who made a report about sexual harassment said that they were unhappy with how the outcome of the case was communicated to them. 75% of those who complained felt that they were negatively treated at work as a result, and 91% of those who complained thought about leaving the army as a direct result.

In other words, not only is the system stacked against you, but if you complain, then there will be hell to pay and you may end up quitting your job. There is something incredibly wrong with a system where people cannot make a complaint for fear that to do so would make things worse. Some shocking evidence suggests that female complainants are advised by their chain of command to resolve issues informally, even where a criminal offence may have been committed.

There is a darker side too – in 2020 alone the Service Police investigated 161 cases of sexual assault. Of these 180 victims, 137 were female. Of the assailants, of the 150 investigated, 140 were male.

There is clearly a very deep issue with how sexual offences are investigated and tried internally. How can a system which so profoundly discriminates against women on such a systematic scale be capable of objectively delivering justice in the case of a hugely complex sexual assault case?

One has to say that the time is long overdue for sexual assault investigations to be handled by the civil courts. Over the last 5 years, the average conviction rate in civilian court for a sexual offence is 34% - in the military system for the same offences, it is just 16%. Something is going badly wrong.

Clearly a womans place isn't on the front line...

There is no easy path to fixing these issues, and they cannot be fixed overnight or via a really good PowerPoint presentation and mandatory D&I session on a Tuesday at 4pm. One worries that someone will decide that the best thing to do is deliver a training session to the unit, that a bored WO2 will deliver a bunch of badly prepared slides, make some stupid jokes, everyone heads off early and then the unit can mark on its scorecard “delivered” and award itself a green for equal opportunity.

It may sound flippant to talk of ‘Brigade Commanders Study Days’ but that feels like precisely what will happen. Humphrey has images of a mess antre-room full of terribly earnest white male officers sitting around with coffee and moleskin notebooks (senior officers in armchairs), loudly pontificating on how to fix the Regimental diversity problem and coming up with an action plan and slides that will deliver OJAR glory and be given a stiff ignoring.

This may sound harsh but its also probably reasonably accurate picture of what will unfold. Already the MOD response is concerning – its going to be ‘examined’ apparently. That’s official code for ‘a report will be written, response drafted and by the time we’ve worked out what to do we’ll all be posted anyway to lead the “FV432 upgrade to replace for Ajax” project down at LAND”.  

The only way change will come is if two things happen. Firstly, the men in the room need to not come up with solutions to the problems – we cannot own the answer to this one. Strangely enough, men don’t

know what its like to be a woman in the armed forces, so for once, lets not even try to be an instant SME shall we?

Instead the solutions need to be female led, proposals need to be developed which meet womens requirements and the package of measures which are developed and delivered must come from the female military community.

They must also be implemented and fully supported at every level by the chain of command, from 4* downwards, and treated with the urgency and importance of a UOR. There can be no backsliding, or desire to park something, hold it as an enhancement measure, or try to be too clever-  there are real problems here and it requires time, effort and significant cultural blockers to move to change.

Its utterly vital that this problem is tackled head on. This is fundamentally not about ‘PC gone mad’ or ‘wokeness’. Its about taking an utterly objective critical look at ourselves in the mirror and realising that as an organisation we talk a good talk about ‘looking out for our people’ and in this respect we have utterly failed.

If you turned up as a management consultant to a business where something like 15% of the workforce were raising all sorts of alarmbells about their treatment, about their equipment, about the fact that other members of the workforce actively attack them and discriminate against them and when they complain, they are seen as trouble makers, you’d be uncomfortable.

Yet this is what is happening right now in the British Armed Forces.

It isn’t good enough.

Lets stop with the ‘world class’ or ‘world beating’ bullshit for once. We’re not world class at this, we’re failing miserably. We’ve let our mates, comrades and oppos down by treating them like shit, and then having the audacity to get the hump when we’re rightly called out on it.

If you genuinely care, and you genuinely give a damn about the good name of the military, about being a leader, about standing up for the values, standards and ethos of what it is to be a member of the British Armed Forces, then step up and stop tolerating this treatment – lead by example, not by following the herd.

The time for change is now – grasp it and become a better organisation in the process.