ADF must stop closing ranks on sexual abuse of servicewomen

Sydney Morning Herald

a day ago

The Australian Defence Force's continuing inertia on the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide and Ben Roberts-Smith, VC, suggests it is locked in a purgatory of its own creation. It only gets worse. Now the organisation has been revealed as failing to protect servicewomen from predators within its own ranks.
Using classified reports and other secret material, the Herald and 60 Minutes have shown how officialdom has betrayed women who have been victims of sexual violence by fellow servicemen, leaving them ignored, sidelined and marginalised.
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Reporter Nick McKenzie and producer Garry McNab interviewed former servicewomen who suffered sexual assaults and then endured the pain that followed, a suffering that turned into anger heightened by the ADF's failure to help them heal.
Their harrowing stories include: the accused rapist who returned as a Defence contractor only to be charged with another rape; the high-ranking SAS officer who assaulted a fellow female officer at a reunion; and the junior airwoman assaulted at knife-point who was forced out and hit by a military gag order that the ADF refuses to remove.
The ADF has been wrestling with its dismal record on protecting women servicemen since the 2013 'Skype scandal' at Duntroon, where a male trainee officer filmed a sexual encounter with a female trainee and broadcast it live to other male trainees. It triggered the largest organisational reform effort in Defence's history. But apparently to little avail.
The royal commission's September 2024 report into defence and veteran suicide described data showing almost 800 reported sexual assaults over the past five years – a number it warned concealed the true scale of the problem given an estimated under-reporting rate of 60 per cent and the military's failure to 'accurately quantify' all cases of sexual misconduct. The commission also found an unknown number of ADF personnel with sexual offence convictions for attacks on their colleagues were still serving.
Ludicrously, more than nine months after the commission demanded a fresh, focused inquiry into military sexual violence, the Albanese government has yet to announce who will lead the investigation and its terms of reference.
Even Lieutenant General Natasha Fox, who as ADF chief of personnel is leading reform efforts to combat sexual violence, is in the dark. Asked to respond to the woman now speaking out, Fox admitted the ADF had failed to protect servicewomen. 'I'm sorry we weren't there when you needed us,' she said.
Such behaviour is not tolerated in other workplaces. The Albanese government's prevarication is unconscionable. But the ADF's inaction on so many fronts is the stuff of powerful hierarchies with their own codes and loyalties. No institution, whether cloaked in khaki, clerical or any other garb, should ever be a law unto itself.