‘Sexualized culture’ in military overstated

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’actualite, 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, nudge-nudge.

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 outsidethe-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 welleducated, sophisticated and modern thinkers.

At the Royal Military College of Canada 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 rite 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 boozefuelled 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. National Post