This harrowing account of institutional military abuse draws on interviews with nearly 70 survivors and analyses every review and inquiry into military culture (35 in total) since the Vietnam War.
In the 1980s, women constituted 6.5% of the ADF. By the 1990s, that percentage had nearly doubled, and today, women make up around 20% of the Australian military. As gender demographics in the ADF shifted, sexual violence was increasingly deployed against women. Wadham and Connor argue the growing presence of women intensified the sexualised culture of the military to reiterate the “white, hypermasculinist” fraternity.
Date rape was a strategy for humiliating women and destroying their reputation. Sexual assault was often done by superiors, in view of other serving members, and always followed by a “code of silence, victim-blaming and discouragement from commanders and military police”. One interviewee sought support after being assaulted, but was warned by the military psychologist: “Defence doesn’t look fondly on people that see a psychologist.”
Constant threats and acts of violence from peers led some women to be coerced into “survival sex” in exchange for protection. In one of the saddest testimonies of the book, a young aviator was coerced into sleeping with her sergeant for years to prevent other abuse. “Then I found out that he was actually one of the people behind the stalking and sexual assault that had happened […] that went on for years.”
Sexual violence against women was underpinned by a deeply misogynist culture. Harassment of women was a “daily occurence” in the 1980s. By the 1990s, women reported practices such as “pornos in the mornos” – watching porn at morning tea in communal spaces. Harassment and intimidation continue to this day: in 2018, one woman reported she was “choosing not to eat, not to go out, not to do any sites” to avoid the executive officer constantly harassing her. When she reported him, she was told “I would have had a better case if I let it progress to rape”.
Wadham and Connor cite a 1993 book of cadet slang that included over 300 abusive terms that reduced women to literal sexual objects. These included: “a body to wank into, cum bucket, fuck bag, life support system for a cunt”. This language was part of daily training, imbued in the culture from the top down.
One veteran reported that her instructor “would talk about where to get the cheapest sex in Asia and how to get the daughter thrown in for a dollar”. The authors analyse the function of banter in the military, explaining that “lingo” works to “create a shared culture”, but can also be used to “target, exclude, belittle”. Sexualised “banter” was frequently used to alienate women and was “the first step in creating cultures of abuse and violence”.
Source: ‘Survival sex’, ‘mob justice’ and more: the first independent study of abuse in the Australian Defence Force is damning
