Military culture ‘hostile’ to women, gays, report finds
Senior military leaders are promising action after an explosive report found an “underlying sexual culture” in the Canadian Armed Forces that is hostile to women and leaves victims of sexual assault and harassment to fend for themselves.
But exactly what action will be taken, and whether it will be enough, remains uncertain.
On Thursday, the military released the results of a year-long investigation by retired Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps into military sexual harassment and assaults. Military commanders ordered the external probe in April 2014 after an investigation by l’Actualité and Maclean’s concluded that such incidents were being ignored or downplayed.
For her report, Deschamps interviewed hundreds of full- and part-time military personnel, as well as commanding officers, military police, chaplains, nurses and social workers. Many interviews were on a confidential basis.
The interviews pointed to what Deschamps described as a “hostile sexualized environment” in the military, particularly among recruits and the junior ranks, which included everything from swearing and sexual innuendo to “dubious relationships” between low-ranking women and highranking men. It also included rape.
“At the most extreme, these reports of sexual violence highlighted the use of sex to enforce power relationships,” Deschamps’s report reads, “and to punish and ostracize a member of a unit.”
The military’s leadership came under particularly harsh criticism. Deschamps found military personnel “became inured to this sexualized culture as they move up the ranks,” with officers turning a blind eye to inappropriate conduct and senior non-commissioned officers “imposing a culture where no one speaks up.”
Deschamps said it is “readily apparent” that a large percentage of incidents involving sexual harassment and sexual assault in the military are not reported. Victims were worried they would hurt their careers, not be believed, or even face retaliation from peers and supervisors.
“Underlying all these concerns is a deep mistrust that the chain of command will take such complaints seriously,” the report says, adding, “Comprehensive cultural change is therefore required, and such change cannot occur without the proactive engagement of senior leaders.”
Deschamps made 10 recommendations. Many related to the establishment of an independent centre outside the military that would be responsible for receiving reports of inappropriate sexual misconduct, as well as overseeing prevention, victim support and research.
In the face of such stinging criticism, the military’s most senior leadership went to great lengths Thursday to convey to Canadian Forces members and the public that it had accepted the findings and was ready to act. However, it was uneasy with the idea of an independent centre.
During a 90-minute press conference attended by the heads of the Canadian army, air force and navy, Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Tom Lawson said it was unacceptable that any military personnel should “have to defend themselves against the words or the actions of another Canadian Armed Forces member.”
He touted the recent appointment of Maj.-Gen. Christine Whitecross, the military’s most senior female officer, to head a task force charged with developing a course of action, and monitoring and reporting on the results.
“This is a complex problem within a complex institution,” Lawson said. “The situation therefore will require a sustained effort from across the Canadian Forces for an extended period of time. We’re not talking about days and weeks, but months and years.”
But when it came to the centrepiece of Deschamps’s recommendations, the establishment of the independent centre outside the military, both Lawson and Whitecross were non-committal.
In fact, Whitecross repeatedly referred to a “centralized capability,” while Lawson said at various times that the idea was “unique,” “complex,” and one “anyone within the chain of command would at first be concerned with.”
“What we need to do is look at what provides the proper outcome for our members,” Lawson said. “We need to look at what’s legal within our system, what’s expected of us from the government, what the chief of defence staff expects from his chain of command. It’s important that we look at all of those factors.”
Whitecross and her team are expected to visit the U.S., Australia and several European countries in the coming weeks, as well as meet with experts in Canada, before drawing a final conclusion.
For her part, Deschamps told reporters the creation of an independent centre outside the military, as has already been established in the United States, Australia and France, is “essential.” But she later added that if Canadian military officials “find better practices than what I found, I will listen.”
During the press conference, Lawson found himself defending comments he made in May 2014, in which he referenced an internal Canadian Forces survey from 2012 that found 98.5 per cent of military members said they had not been subject to sexual misconduct. At the time, he warned against “jumping to conclusions.”
“We had indications of very few individuals coming forward. Our belief therefore was that our policies and procedures were working very well,” he said Thursday. “But what Madame Deschamps’ study and report brought forward is it may not have been working at the level we had confidence in.”
At first blush it’s a withering report — there’s a “sexualized culture” within the Canadian Forces that is so pervasive it’s “conducive to more serious incidents of sexual harassment and assault” and so hostile to women that victims rarely bother to report or complain.
That’s the picture in an 87-page report written by former Supreme Court of Canada judge Marie Deschamps, who was asked last summer by retiring Chief of the Defence Staff Tom Lawson to examine the scope of the problem.
The report, called External Review into Sexual Misconduct and Sexual Harassment in the Canadian Armed Forces, was released in Ottawa Thursday.
Lawson’s request came in the wake of sensational allegations in Maclean’s magazine and its Quebec sister publication, L’actualité, documenting specific incidents of assault and the military’s failure to do anything much about them.
In fact, Deschamps’ report mirrors the magazines’ findings and tone, though it lacks the real names and details that gave the news stories such punch. Confidentiality and anonymity are the imprimatur of this report.
The former judge’s language is inflammatory: Unnamed cadets at the two Canadian military colleges described sexual harassment as a “passage obligé,” almost a mandatory experience, and said sexual assault was “an ever-present risk”; within the lower ranks, unnamed women said they are routinely exposed to “swear words and highly degrading expressions;” experiences with sexual harassment and assault “begin as early as basic training;” unnamed leaders such as senior non-commissioned officers, or NCOs, turn a blind eye to misconduct; some of those charged with investigating it, unnamed military police, don’t even know what constitutes consent to sex and infecting it all, a climate where such behaviour is tolerated, or ignored or sanctioned with a wink-wink, nudgenudge.
And though Deschamps grudgingly acknowledges that unnamed higher-ranked women “seemingly do not suffer as much from the sexualized environment” and that some particularly “resolute” victims had been able to confront the perpetrators, she dismisses them as the exception.
She actually concludes, of such non-complainers, “this is largely because members appear to internalize the prevailing sexualized culture as they move up through the organization.”
Deschamps makes 10 recommendations, probably the most critical the establishment of an outside-the-chain-of-command agency, with the temporary acronym of CASAH (Centre for Accountability for Sexual Assault and Harassment), which would be responsible for receiving all reports of inappropriate sexual conduct, training, victim support and research.
That only makes sense in the small, intimate world of the CF, particularly on bases or when troops are deployed.
That soldiers sometimes not only work together but also often live side-by-side makes it more important that victims have a safe place, outside of the hierarchy, to report.
But another recommendation would see soldiers allowed to report harassment or assault to the CASAH “without the obligation to trigger a formal complaint process” — a probable recipe for the very sort of mess that saw two Liberal Members of Parliament recently suspended, their names and careers in tatters, after two NDP MPs made serious informal allegations against them, but declined to file complaints.
The former judge, who retired from the high court in 2012, held town hall meetings at military bases across Canada, did telephone interviews, accepted written statements and organized focus groups, and in total heard from 700 individuals.
That’s a significant number from across the ranks and I accept that the military, like most civilian institutions from the House of Commons on down, likely has its share of the handsy, sexist and worse, and that the women who came forward to Maclean’s and L’actualite suffered. But that’s a fraction of the 100,000 regular, reserve and civilian members of the CF, and in Deschamps’ florid broad brush strokes, I didn’t even recognize the organization I think I know pretty well.
I’ve spent an extended amount of time with Canadian soldiers in three very different ways.
Once, I was the lone woman and lone reporter on a Royal Canadian Regiment re-enactment of the regiment’s trip to the Yukon in the late 1800s (we travelled by river raft to Dawson City). In the first summer of the war in the former Yugoslavia, when Canadian troops, the Van Doos, were tasked with opening up the Sarajevo airport for humanitarian aid, I was there for several weeks. And finally, in 2006-07, I made four trips, mostly with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry but also with the other two regular infantry regiments and countless reservists, as an embedded journalist with troops in Kandahar.
I certainly heard plenty of profanity and raw language (engaged in it too, often the worst offender) but in none of those places was there a simmering highly sexualized culture, let alone one that was dangerous to women. The tensions were those that I consider normal in fraught environments, or in places where men outnumber women (such as the sports world, where once I worked).
Now, that I was never once alarmed or offended may mean only that I am beyond offence, or as Deschamps would say, that I have internalized it all or am particularly resolute — in other words, a freak who wouldn’t recognize a highly sexualized culture if it bit me in the arse.
But the military she describes is so completely contrary to my own experience that I feel compelled to say so.
I found NCOs to be generally good leaders, some superb. Most officers I got to know — a handful of majors and one particularly stellar lieutenant-colonel — are ridiculously well-educated, sophisticated and modern thinkers. At the Royal Military College in Kingston, where I’ve been a couple of times, I found the smartest and most engaged students, women and men, in the country; I really struggle to accept that they all would just blithely tolerate sexual harassment as a right of passage. I’ve also adopted a reserve regiment, and have spent a fair bit of time in their collective company, even at the sort of booze-fuelled events Deschamps so dislikes.
The report is likely to cause what is now the usual shock/ horror/outrage, as did the CBC’s internal report into its own handling of the Jian Ghomeshi scandal, as did the unfolding of the anonymous allegations against the two Liberal MPs. The judge refers to both those stories in her introduction.
It’s in the third sentence of that intro that she writes, “The problem of sexual misconduct in society at large cannot be overstated.”
Actually, it’s often overstated, and that’s just what she’s done here, again.