Australia’s military as a force for sexual abuse

“Participants expected the costs of war, but they were not prepared for the costs of service,” explain Ben Wadham and James Connor in their new book, the first independent study of military institutional abuse in the Australian Defence Force.

Warrior, Soldier, Brigand draws on interviews with nearly 70 survivors and analyses every review and inquiry into military culture (35 in total) since the Vietnam War.

It’s a harrowing account of more than a century of widespread institutional abuse in Australia’s military forces. Brutality was systematically inflicted on junior cadets, who were beaten, violated and humiliated under the rationale of “bastardization.” In a hypersexualized culture, misogyny and gender-based violence were endemic.

Women were in constant danger of sexual assault from their peers and superiors. This abuse was often compounded by a “second assault,” where victims were punished for reporting, with administrative abuse and “mob justice.”

The terms “warrior, soldier, brigand”, which describe different military identities, are contested (as the authors concede). The Brereton report, which found “credible” information to implicate 25 current or former Australian special forces personnel in the unlawful killing of 39 people in Afghanistan, also found that alleged war criminals self-identified as “warrior heroes”.

But the authors don’t use these terms to make sense of their findings. They use the key values they identify in Australian military culture: martial, fraternal and exceptional. These values, they show, are twisted into an obsession with violence, exclusivity and elitism within the Australian Defence Force.

The book begins by outlining the “character of military institutional abuse” before focusing on