Women in the Armed Forces

Stephanie Peacock Excerpts

Thursday 9th December 2021 Westminster Hall

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I begin by thanking the hon. Member for Wrexham (Sarah Atherton) for all her work in delivering the report, and I place on record my thanks to the service personnel and veterans who contributed to this groundbreaking inquiry.

As the report highlights, the vast majority of our female personnel have fantastic, fulfilling careers serving our country and would recommend it to others. Last week, the Government promised some very welcome changes to make this experience even better. As the hon. Member for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan) pointed out, the Government response to the report is comprehensive. It is great that uniform and equipment will be improved to make sure that helmets, armour and uniform fit properly. That is a fundamental change. I am also pleased that steps will be taken towards independence from the chain of command in the service complaints system. It represents important progress for female personnel to have their complaints of sexual assault dealt with by someone outside their direct chain of command. Among the other recommendations, I welcome the new set of policies on women’s health and the targets for increasing the inflow of women into our armed forces, although I have concerns that the current targets are not being met.

However, as the report emphasises, when things go wrong for women in the armed forces, they go dramatically wrong. The Government must act more quickly if they are to resolve issues of bullying, violence and harassment in the culture of our armed forces. The most serious aspect of the report is the level of sexual violence it reveals, as highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck). Female service personnel are more than 10 times more likely than males to have experienced sexual harassment in the last 12 months. The revelations were accompanied by shocking evidence, with many cases, disturbingly, involving senior officers as wrongdoers.

As a result, in line with the Lyons review and Labour policy, the report recommends that the most serious offences be tried in civilian courts. The Armed Forces Bill offered a number of clear chances to implement that proposal, but the Government voted against it again and again. The Minister was pressed repeatedly by Members from across the House in the debate on the Bill on Monday to explain that position, and I simply do not understand his logic. He claimed he was confident that the new serious crime unit and the service justice system are capable of dealing with all offences, citing the statistic that 1.6% of rapes reported to civilian police made it to court in 2020, compared with 50% of those reported to the military police. Not only are those percentages a poor comparison because of the size of the populations that they reflect, but the Minister neglected to mention that conviction rates in military courts are far lower than in civilian courts. Between 2015 and 2020, the conviction rate for rape cases tried under court martial was just 9%.

Even when there are convictions in military courts, offenders often get off on light charges. I met a serving member of the armed forces, who wished to remain anonymous. She shared with me her experience of sexual assault and the painful ordeal she had to go through in attempting to get justice. On the day of her trial, the charge was reduced from a criminal case to a disciplinary matter. In that instance, the defendant was convicted of misconduct through alcohol under section 20 of the Armed Forces Act 2006, despite the fact that the manual of service law explicitly states that section 20 should not be used for more serious offences. Worse still, the women involved are forced to remain silent afterwards for fear of bringing the armed forces into disrepute, or being accused of doing so.

The serving member was moved to contact me as she not only felt that the system had denied her justice but was “appalled” by the Government’s response to my parliamentary question on military sexual trauma, the existence of which the Ministry of Defence continues to refute. On 12 July this year, I submitted a parliamentary question asking what steps the Ministry of Defence had taken to ensure understanding and acknowledgement of that term, and it told me that it does not accept the term. In its response to the report, the MOD denies the existence of military sexual trauma once again.

The charity Salute Her—I have met representatives from it over the last few months, and the report commends it for its work and support—points to other countries, such as the US, that are already using the term to gather insight into the experiences of assault faced by women in the armed forces and to change policy accordingly. If this Government refuse to acknowledge military sexual trauma, the Minister will not be able to understand sexual assault in the armed forces fully, tackle it at scale or provide the support that victims need.

According to the report, nearly 62% of female service personnel and veterans have experienced bullying, harassment and discrimination, and nearly 40% say that their experience of the complaints system was extremely poor. However, instead of building real reform into the complaints system, the Ministry of Defence has attempted to apply a quick fix, giving itself licence to reduce the appeal period to two weeks. It has ignored appeals against that in proceedings on the Armed Forces Bill, and it has done so again in the response to this report. Fixing the complaints system is not just about making the process faster; it is about ensuring that women feel able to bring their complaints to light and guaranteeing that those complaints will be taken seriously.

Overall, we will never see the significant change that is needed to make women welcome in the military without addressing the culture that allows assault, bullying and discrimination to take place. After accepting the recommendations of the Wigston review, the Ministry of Defence is well aware that too little has been done to implement them; as the Chair of the Defence Committee, the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), highlighted, only one of the 36 recommendations on inappropriate behaviour has been achieved. It is therefore a huge disappointment that the Ministry of Defence has rejected this report’s recommendation for an in-depth review of the implementation of Wigston next year.

Also key to the culture is ensuring that women feel they are fairly represented at all levels. However, according to the current trends for inflow of women into the armed forces, the MOD will not meet its 30% target, which is set out in the response, for more than 80 years. The mistake of wasting time, stalling on targets and letting the culture go unchecked must not be made again. Women remain in danger every day that the culture is not addressed.

I conclude with a few questions for the Minister. I would like him to explain how the Department will begin to understand and tackle the problem of widespread sexual assault and violence in the military, if it will not recognise that military sexual trauma exists. Will he tell the House why the Ministry of Defence has failed to implement many of the Wigston Review recommendations, leading to another damning report of this nature? Will he commit now to finally establishing a central defence authority with responsibility for culture in the armed forces?

I thank the Committee and our service personnel once again for this groundbreaking report. I welcome the range of recommendations accepted by the Government and I look forward to seeing many more women complete successful careers in our armed forces. However, if we are to tackle the serious issue of harassment, bullying and sexual assault in our armed forces, the Government can and must go much further.

--- Later in debate ---

[Leo Docherty]

I thank the hon. Member for her intervention. It is conceivable that a case being tried in the courts martial may actually be a better outcome for the welfare needs of a victim, due to the constraints around career sustainability or location. Clearly, I am not saying that that is a given; I am saying that the civilian prosecutor should have the final say, but it is entirely conceivable that not having a case taken out of courts martial and into the civilian system may be a better outcome for the welfare interests of the victim.

[Stephanie Peacock]

It is conceivable, but it is not very likely. I am sure the Minister is aware of Salute Her, the charity, which I spoke to yesterday and which was very involved in the report. We spoke about the fact that it has helped 600 victims of sexual assault and not one of them said they wanted their case heard in court martial. What does the Minister say to that charity on that point?

[Leo Docherty]

I would remind the charity that that is why we have concurrent jurisdiction and why it is entirely plausible. If cases would be better heard in the civilian context, they will be. That is a decision for the civilian prosecutor.