A war on two fronts: How the British military fails women who report rapes

In her first two years in the Royal Navy, Jane was raped twice.

Jane, whose name we have changed to to protect her identity, joined the armed forces in the mid-Noughties, when she was in her late twenties. She was eager to build a career after spending the previous decade travelling and working in tourism and the Navy felt like the right fit. She loved the sea, loved seeing new places and wanted to learn new skills. These two assaults, she said, shook her faith in a profession that had long called out to her.

“I didn’t say anything,” Jane told openDemocracy, explaining that she didn’t report either attack because she felt she couldn’t speak to anyone about them. “Not until years later, when I spoke to a colleague who was on the ship with me where the second rape took place. He noticed that I’d changed during that time and wondered if something had happened to me.”

Then, nearly a decade later in 2014, she says she was sexually assaulted by another senior male colleague.

In this instance, she said, the man exposed himself to her and demanded oral sex. “He asked it as if it was normal,” she said. “I kept saying no, I kept repeating the same thing: I don’t want to. And he kept asking.

“In the end, he forced a massive kiss on me. It was horrific. I was recovering from surgery, so when it happened, I couldn’t run off,” she continued. “And he knew that.”

Jane made a formal complaint about this 2014 encounter. The backlash, she said, “was like I’d released a hand grenade into the camp”.

Uneven justice

Jane’s experience is far from unique.

openDemocracy spoke to half a dozen women with military experience, reviewed testimony from Parliamentary debates and committees, submitted dozens of Freedom of Information requests, and analysed data from six years of military court cases and military police reports, to reveal a pervasive culture of misogyny in the British military. Women serving in the armed forces say sexual bullying, harassment and even assault occurs with impunity.

The British military operates its own judiciary – known as the Services Justice System – with the Navy, Army and Air Force each having their own dedicated police service. This allows the armed forces to investigate crimes specific to the military – such as going absent without leave – as well as serious criminal conduct such as rape and sexual assault committed by serving personnel.

In our investigation, openDemocracy found that people accused of rape and sexual assault in court martials in military courts are far less likely to be found guilty than in civilian courts.

Fewer than a quarter (23%) of the 93 rape cases heard in court martials between January 2018 and April 2024 resulted in a guilty verdict, according to our analysis of court martial outcomes published by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). This compares to an average 70% conviction rate for rape cases heard in civilian courts.

Taken as a percentage, the military is more likely to prosecute an alleged rape compared to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the body that determines which crimes should go to trial in the civilian system, but less likely to deliver a guilty verdict.

Those convicted of rape in the military are sentenced to between four and 14 years in prison, the same sentences meted out by civilian courts, and then discharged from the military.

The large disparity between the outcomes of cases tried by the military and the UK judiciary raises questions over whether the armed forces’ justice system is failing women like Jane.

Our analysis found that nearly a quarter of British court martials in the same six-year period related to sexual offences – including rape, child sex offences, indecent exposure and ‘misconduct of an indecent kind’ – against colleagues and civilians.

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The British military’s court martials take place across the world, so the justice system can operate when alleged criminal acts occur abroad. In England the majority are heard at two military courts in Wiltshire and Yorkshire. The defendant has the right to appeal a guilty verdict, in a process that mirrors the civilian courts system.

Unlike in the civilian courts, however, where crimes are judged by a 12-person jury of the defendant’s peers and a judge, court martials are heard by a military judge advocate and a board made up of three to six senior members of the military.

Board members are selected from a pool of senior armed forces personnel, including retired and reservist members, from across the Royal Navy, Army and RAF, with names selected at random. The size of the board depends on the seriousness of the offence being heard, and its members join the court martial’s judge advocate, the military equivalent of a judge, to decide on the sentence.

Women have been able to join the British military for 86 years. But despite serving alongside men for decades, today they make up just 11% of the armed forces, and only 5% of senior roles – a disparity that shapes its culture. Even former head of the British Army Nick Carter has warned that the military has “an overly sexualised culture in which inappropriate behaviour is deemed acceptable”.

As this investigation reveals, the UK’s women soldiers are fighting a war on two fronts: against the enemy, and against misogyny.

The hand grenade

The low conviction rates for sexual offences are just one way in which women are discriminated against in the military court system. Alleged perpetrators are not suspended during investigations, meaning many servicewomen who accuse their colleagues may be forced to continue working with their abusers or often face torment from colleagues who don’t believe them.

After Jane reported the alleged sexual assault to the military police, she said, she was bullied by the man she had accused, and her colleagues closed ranks in support of him. The bullying, she said, was intended to discredit her because of the pending court martial.

As the abusive behaviour escalated, she submitted a service complaint – the military’s way to report issues such as bullying, harassment and intimidation that its code of conduct deems “unacceptable” – against her alleged abuser and a second colleague.

A complainant can ask for the redress they want. For Jane, it was a letter of apology and, as she wrote in her complaint, for “the work environment to change so no one else has to experience the same work environment that I was challenged with”.

“I was forced to work beside my perpetrator,” she said. “I kept complaining. That did not go down well at all. They play the fear factor. They don’t treat you like you are a victim, formally you are called a ‘complainer’. All the Navy cares about is protecting its reputation.”

“I thought by working harder, the behaviour would stop,” Jane wrote in her complaint, which openDemocracy has reviewed.

Instead, she said, things got worse. “It was stalking behaviour,” she explained. The unit, her complaint stated, “did not take seriously the need” for her to work separately from the alleged perpetrator. Her complaint was not upheld.

At the same time, the Royal Naval Police was investigating Jane’s sexual assault report, and referred her case to the Services Prosecuting Authority (SPA), the military equivalent of the CPS. The SPA decided not to direct Jane’s complaint to trial, saying it did not believe there was a “realistic prospect of conviction”.

Jane appealed the decision, which led to the appointment of a new prosecutor and a trial being set.

Remarkably, given the nature of sexual assault, Jane’s case was heard by an all-male board. “When I walked in and saw it was all men, all old men, I was like: this is the old boys’ club,” Jane said. “I knew I’d fail.”

It was an isolating experience. “The defence questioned me for hours, saying I had encouraged him, alleging that I had pursued him,” she said. “They made out that I was a prostitute.”

That’s when Jane said she knew she was going to lose the case.

Her alleged perpetrator was found not guilty on all counts.

Depressed and struggling with PTSD, Jane felt she had “no way out”. She considered taking her own life once the trial ended. Thankfully, a colleague she confided in intervened to get her help.

All-male boards were banned in January 2023, when the MoD amended court martial guidelines to say all boards must include at least one woman. But this decision came too late for Jane and hundreds of women like her. Even today, the military’s continuing gender imbalance means boards remain male-dominated.

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Ingrained misogyny

In the years between the two unreported rapes and her 2014 sexual assault, Jane faced a campaign of sexist bullying by colleagues, which she said is not unusual for women in the armed forces.

“It’s classed as normal,” she said. “They would give me fake orders, unlawful orders, because I was a woman. I would be given an order to commit suicide overnight, then I’d be punished the next day for not following orders.”

The punishments ranged from verbal abuse to explicit sexual bullying.

Jane recalled working in a hangar when she “was told to get on the floor naked… I said no, but then I’d disobeyed an order. When the commanding officer came down, he went after me for disobeying an order.”

On another occasion, she said, “they put me in a cage, in the middle of the hangar, where we would keep equipment, cleaning materials, things like that. All these men were prowling around outside, but I had to go in, to follow orders.”

openDemocracy put these examples to the MoD, but were told it does not comment on individual cases.

Zoe Jackson from Aurora, a charity that provides specialist sexual and domestic abuse support to members of the forces, told openDemocracy that the military’s hierarchical nature can lead to abuse.

“There is a command and control culture, there has to be because you are trained to follow orders, so you can go into battle together,” Jackson explained. “But where there are power dynamics, there are people who will exploit that.”

One former member of the army reserves, who wished to remain anonymous, asked openDemocracy, “if this is how they are treating their own colleagues, how are they treating women in war zones? How are they treating civilian women abroad?”

During our investigation, openDemocracy found online discussions – which we have corroborated with women veterans – about a practice at social events where attendees must remove their clothes at the command “naked bar”.

“There’s a lot of stuff that goes on that you don’t hear about and you don’t want to hear about,” said Jane. “But it’s acceptable within the military.”

Paula Edwards, the founder of the charity Salute Her said serving personnel boasted about using sex workers, including an incident where men shaved a sex worker. A British Medical Journal report noted an ‘initiation’ that sees new recruits stationed in Kenya made to flip a coin to decide if they can use a condom when paying a local woman for sex.

That men sitting on court martial boards are steeped in this culture shows that “investigations into sexual offences within the military need to be independent”, said Edwards.

To further understand who might serve on a court martial board, openDemocracy looked at the Army Rumour Service (ARRSE) – an unofficial online forum for current and former members of the British Army. Because the forum uses pseudonyms, it is not possible to identify its members.

openDemocracy found numerous instances of members who said on forum threads that they had sat on court martial boards, and who on separate threads made misogynistic comments and spoke dismissively about sexual assault.

These included jokes about handcuffing a woman to a bed; derogatory comments on women’s breasts and genitals, and sexual comments about female celebrities.

In a thread about Colonel Martin Toney, who was found guilty of sexually assaulting a fellow officer in 2021 and dismissed from the army without any criminal punishment, a forum member expressed his concern that the assault “was hardly the crime of the century” and had “hurt nothing but the woman’s feelings”. Toney’s conviction, he said, was “grossly unfair”. The poster claimed to have sat on a court martial board.

It is not known which court martials the members sat on, and there is no evidence to suggest they judged sexual offences cases. The comments, however, reveal the military’s misogynistic culture permeates the senior-most ranks, including those tasked with judging what does and doesn’t constitute serious gender crimes such as rape and sexual assault.

This atmosphere of normalised misogyny has raised concerns about the safety of young recruits. The Conservative Party has announced it will bring in National Service for 18-year-olds if it wins the general election on 4 July, which would bring an additional 30,000 teenagers into the armed forces each year.

“That’s a lot of young people who don’t necessarily have a barometer of what's normal, when it comes to consent,” said Jackson, from Aurora. “You’ve then got those young people all living and working together, there is a drinking culture, and there is a rank structure and hierarchy which brings with it power dynamics that can be misused. What looks to those young people as fine and consensual, might actually be exploitative. It is a potential safeguarding nightmare."

The MoD introduced a zero tolerance policy for unacceptable sexual behaviour in 2022.

A culture of silence

Georgia Hinton waived her right to anonymity after being raped by a soldier in 2018, when she lived on a military base in Gloucestershire with her serving ex-wife and daughter. The trauma of the attack left Hinton feeling unsafe in her own home.

Though the rapist, Serupepeli Niubasaga, was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison after she reported the attack to civilian police, Hinton says she found the military obstructive in her search for justice.

“The military closes ranks,” she said. “And that’s why I spoke out. It’s very difficult reporting a crime like rape on a military base. Everyone knows each other personally, they all live and work together.

“How can you report a rape to the chain of command, when the rapist might be their best friend? There’s no one there who is removed from life in the base, no one who can be independent.”

Hinton later learnt that her friends in the military had been criticised for encouraging her to report the assault to the civilian, rather than the military justice system.

“They were told that we should have kept it in-house, and that was a shock to me at the time,” she said. “It became very apparent that they wanted it quietly dealt with. And I won’t be quiet about it.”

Hinton was not in the military, but Jackson from Aurora said this culture of silence may lead to servicewomen not reporting crimes for fear of damaging their careers. “Women are concerned about the implications of speaking out,” she told openDemocracy. “Whether they will be believed, whether they will get into trouble, whether they will miss out on promotions.”

Offences such as rape and sexual assault are crimes whether the accused is in the military or not. Victims – including serving personnel – therefore have the right to report to the military or the civilian police.

A 2011 protocol states that there should be “consultation” between the CPS and the SPA “regarding the appropriate jurisdiction” for an alleged sexual offence by a member of the armed forces that took place in the UK.

However, Freedom of Information requests made to the director of public prosecutions (DPP) by openDemocracy, and a previous request made by the NGO Liberty, found the DPP holds “no recorded information … where the DPP has been called upon by the Director of Service Prosecutions to make a decision regarding jurisdiction”.

The MoD confirmed decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.

In 2021, Hinton launched a petition on the House of Commons website to require civilian police to handle all military sexual assault claims. This did not receive the 100,000 signatures required to force a parliamentary debate and, like all other such petitions, was closed when Parliament was dissolved last month ahead of the general election.

An MoD spokesperson said: “we have established the Defence Serious Crime Command and Victim Witness Care Unit to provide specialist support to victims and witnesses of serious crime, independently from the military chain of command.

“Sexual assault and other sexual offences are not tolerated in the Armed Forces and we are prioritising stamping them out. We have made significant changes to how incidents are reported and investigated including the introduction of a new app which allows personnel to raise and track concerns online.”

Post-trauma

Jane finally left the forces in 2018, following a medical discharge. “They wanted to get rid of me, and by that point I was happy to go,” she said.

“I had depression and trauma,” Jane continued. Medical records seen by openDemocracy show she was struggling with PTSD symptoms including flashbacks and nightmares. “But they also accused me of being delusional, of being deranged and psychotic.”

More women leave the armed forces each year than join, with the MoD’s biannual diversity statistics showing they are more likely than men to be medically discharged, in part because of a higher presentation of mental health reasons than their male colleagues.

While serving in conflict zones is a leading cause of mental health issues such as PTSD, women are also more likely to experience a second leading cause: sexual violence.

Women who are raped by military colleagues experience “institutional betrayal,” said Salute Her’s Nicole Dodds. “The rape or assault is one trauma, then the institutional betrayal is a second trauma.” Research from the US found that female veterans reporting military sexual trauma were nine times more likely to be diagnosed with PTSD compared with female veterans with no history of sexual assault.

Six years after walking off the base and binning her uniform, Jane is receiving palliative care for cancer. “It’s a bit rubbish, my life, I’ll give you that,” she said.

Since Jane left, the MoD has launched a new strategy for tackling sexual offending, including new training on unacceptable behaviours.

“I was able to speak out,” Jane finished. “And the Navy didn’t like me speaking out. I was meant to be subservient, in a place where sexual assault is normalised. They wanted to control everything, to control me – because if they can’t control everything, it impacts their reputation. That’s what the Navy cares about, above all. Protecting its reputation.”

“The MoD – and hence the military – has a problem with being very defensive, it has an obsession with reputation and process,” agreed RAF veteran and academic Sophy Antrobus. “The good thing is that more women are speaking out. But to change the culture takes a strategic shock.

“This is not going to be fixed in one or two years, but if there is political will, if this is made a political priority, it can change for the better.”

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