Our military courts are still failing survivors of sexual violence

The handling of sexual offences in the Service Justice System – the British Armed Forces’ own justice system – is still not delivering justice to victims. This is despite controversy after controversy, MP debates in parliament and rape survivors speaking out about the abuse they’ve suffered inside the military.

Earlier this month, openDemocracy reported on how the military denied justice to Jessica* for more than 20 years after she reported having been abused while growing up on a British Army base in Germany. An appeal hearing last week refused to increase the four-year sentence (half of which will be served out of prison on licence) that her abuser, Martin Roberts, received at a military court earlier this year.

The Centre for Military Justice was set up in 2019 and we’ve seen harrowing cases and predators walking free, time and again; women reporting assault describe finding themselves the focus of the military police’s investigative attention, rather than the alleged perpetrators; serious delays in military police investigations; sexual offences downgraded to “misconduct through alcohol” offences; and serious failings in victim support.

There have also been serious shortcomings in forensic investigations, instances of military police investigating other military police and what our clients describe as undue interference from the chain of command.

The wider culture within the armed forces can also make it a very difficult environment for women. The most recent army sexual harassment survey, published in 2022, reported that 35% of servicewomen had described a disturbing experience in the previous year alone, including receiving unwanted explicit material, revenge porn, unwanted sexual touching, and sexual assault. Most of them had not reported it.

But where things truly fall apart is when rape or sexual assault cases reach the military’s Court Martial for trial. According to University College London research from 2023, juries in Crown Court are more likely to convict than acquit in rape cases (75% conviction rate), with the same trend seen in all sexual offence charges (75% conviction rate).

However, looking at data from the Court Martial paints a very different picture. Since 2015, the conviction rate for completed rape cases at Court Martial has hovered at around 20%, with a low of 4% in 2017 and a high of 35% in 2022. Since 2015, the conviction rate for completed sexual assault cases has remained around 40%.

Revealed: How British Army denied justice to child abuse victim for 22 years

Growing up on an army base, Jessica was told the military was family. That changed when she reported sexual abuse

openDemocracySian Norris

Our critics will say we are not comparing like with like – not unreasonably pointing out that the SJS handles a much smaller number of sexual offences each year than the civilian system. But as time passes and we have more years of SJS statistics to examine, that astonishingly low conviction rate appears increasingly hard to explain or justify.

A 2020 independent review of the armed forces’ justice system sparked controversy and calls for change. The report recommended that the most serious criminal offences, including rape, should be tried in civilian courts rather than within the military justice system. This recommendation was quickly rejected by the then defence secretary, Ben Wallace, who claimed the current system is capable of delivering justice to victims.

Following public outcry and a legal challenge by three rape survivors, Wallace agreed to review all policies regarding the handling of sexual assault in the armed forces. Despite this, the government ultimately maintained its position. At the very least though, it was agreed that it is now required that all service personnel must be reminded of their right to report serious crimes to civilian police.

There have been other changes too. The three separate special investigation branches within the military police that were tasked with handling serious crimes (including sexual offences) have been combined into one unit, the Defence Serious Crime Unit. A new protocol was implemented for prosecutors to clearly determine which jurisdiction should be applied in each case. The pool of eligible members for military ‘boards’ (similar to a jury for the Court Martial but involving fewer people and comprising only officers senior to the accused) was slightly expanded. Efforts have been made to ensure that more women are selected to serve on these boards. A specialist victims support unit has been established.

Meanwhile, the time it takes a rape case to get to trial in Court Martial as compared to Crown Court is something that SJS champions can rightly point to as a key and important difference. While the objective is for military cases to take around six months from date of first appearance in court to trial, in the civil system, rape victims are looking at far longer. But this point takes you only so far, given conviction rates in the military court are so much lower. And the answer of course is to speed up and improve the handling of civilian cases, not accept that as an unavoidable, fixed state of affairs.

As long as jurisdiction remains with the SJS, we need to understand what it is about Court Martials and – insofar as we can – military boards that makes convictions in rape cases so hard to achieve. At the CMJ, we continue to see shocking behaviours by some military police in the way they investigate sexual crime.

Operation Soteria has been rolled out across all 43 civil police forces and is changing the way the police investigate sexual crimes by establishing a new framework for the investigation of rape (including focusing on the suspect rather than the victim). We remain very concerned that it is not being embedded into the work of the military police in the same way.

Some observers have speculated that rape cases are perhaps less likely to result in a conviction in the military because they are more likely to involve people who already know each other. Where the act of sex itself is not denied but the issue is whether consent was given, for example, it may come down to whose word is believed. But the Crown Prosecution Service, the main agency tasked with conducting criminal prosecutions in England and Wales, has published data showing that the complainant and the suspect are acquainted with each other in 90% of the rape and sexual assault cases it handles in the civilian justice system. These are, I suggest, more likely to be the same kinds of cases, so that distinction and potential explanation does not appear to apply.

The Labour Party said in opposition that it was going to accept the recommendations of the recent independent review and reverse the previous government’s position. Frankly, it can expect a lot of pushback from inside defence when it does, with particular emphasis on delays in the civilian system and some of the improvements in recent years in the military system. But ultimately, these steps forward are not good enough when conviction rates still show that, if a rape or sexual assault victim in the military is fortunate enough to get their case to Court Martial, they are more likely than not to see their assailant walk free.