ADF must act on sexual abuse of servicewomen

The Australian Defence Force’s continuing inertia on the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide and on former soldier Ben Roberts-Smith 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 internal reports and other secret material, The Age and 60 Minutes have shown how officialdom has betrayed women who have been victims of sexual violence by fellow servicemen, leaving them ignored and marginalised.

Reporter Nick McKenzie and producer Garry McNab interviewed former servicewomen who allege they 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 charges were later dropped); the high-ranking SAS officer who assaulted a fellow female officer at a reunion; and the junior airwoman assaulted at knifepoint who was forced out and hit by a military gag that the ADF removed only after a legal challenge.

The ADF has been wrestling with its dismal record on protecting servicewomen 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. The scandal 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 previous five years – a number that 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.

This was an extremely low bar for action that the government still failed to clear.

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 women 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.

The behaviour revealed 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.

The appraisal from former defence minister Linda Reynolds in The Age on Monday that the military is incapable of reforming itself looks depressingly accurate. She is right too when she suggests that reputation will undoubtedly blunt Defence’s recruiting drive.

Writing in The Age, respected expert Samantha Crompvoets arrives at similar conclusions, pointedly noting inaction can speak volumes, particularly in the face of repeated inquiries sounding the same alarms. “After a while, lack of punishment can start to look like reward, and lack of accountability starts to look a lot like corruption,” she says.

The continuing dereliction of moral and legal duty is that the harm visited on those who served awaits new generations of recruits.

The question facing both the government and Defence is: what woman would want to join the ADF, whose top brass treats them with contempt?

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