‘If you ever tell anyone what happened, I’ll ruin your naval career’: We urgently need to talk about sexual harassment in the armed forces

This article contains references to sexual assault and sexual harassment. 

Louisa* was moments into her first posting on a Royal Navy warship when the man who would throw open her cabin door and threaten to sexually assault her two weeks later, began his unwanted approaches.

When his intimidation ended, a campaign of harassment at the hands of another colleague began in what Louisa, who was 20 at the time, describes to GLAMOUR as a culture of “sexual predication” towards female recruits in the military.

She is among half of the women – and a quarter of men – estimated to experience targeted sexualised behaviour in the Royal Navy, according to a Ministry of Defence (MoD) report published last month, which paints a bleak picture of the scale of sexual harassment.

Two-thirds of women in the army said that parts of the military had a problem with sexual harassment and 61% of female Navy colleagues considered it widespread. In both the army and the Royal Air Force, over one-third of women had received unwelcome comments about their appearance, body or sexual activities.

Louisa, now 28 and the recipient of an unequivocal apology and compensation from the MoD following an almost five year battle for justice, is unsurprised by the statistics: “Within my first couple of days on a ship I realised I’d entered a world that was depraved.

“The culture of sexual jokes and activity, sometimes between older, more senior men and women as young as 16 or 17, is ingrained.  

“One of the first people who spoke to me was an officer in his 40s, biting his lip as he looked me up and down. He told me, ‘You’re a good looking girl,’ and asked if I had sisters. There was sexual predication from early doors.”

A fortnight later, the same man tried to assault her: “I was lying in my cabin, face down on top of the duvet. The door smashed open. He was drunk and drooling and used his body to block me. I asked him to leave but he wouldn’t. He told me: ‘You’re all alone now, you’re going to be mine,’ then threatened to touch me. I screamed for him to leave.

“When I turned to colleagues for help afterwards, one officer told me: ‘If you ever tell anyone what happened, I’ll ruin your naval career.’ It was a boys’ club.’

A quarter of Royal Navy servicewomen and a third in the army – most in junior rankings – have endured what the military term “particularly upsetting experiences” – including harassment, unwelcome touch or comments, sexual talk or displaying explicit material – in the past 12 months, according to the MoD survey. Over 70% said it made them feel uncomfortable at work.

In the Navy, only 15% of cases were reported through the chain of command and only 4% – including Louisa’s – reached a formal written complaint. Respondents reported that perpetrators were “overwhelmingly men.”

Having wanted a military career since childhood, Louisa spent another six months on the ship: “I still had this dream of being in the armed forces, of making it work. But, instead of hearing cries for help, I was painted as a harlot, playing hard to get. Another man began relentlessly harassing me, making sexual advances. He engineered shifts, requesting we work together, and, one night, pushed up against me with an erection. I was sick to my stomach. There was nowhere to turn or run away. For servicewomen, opportunities to talk to someone or report what happened are too often to perpetrators or their friends. A culture of toxic masculinity is enabled and not routinely challenged.”