Thank you, Mr. Chair. I worry that I might go over by a minute or two, so I hope you'll forgive me.
I'd like to begin by acknowledging the relative privilege I've had in my military experience. Unlike many witnesses who have come before you, and unlike many women who have served in the CAF, I have never experienced aggravated rape. I was also a reservist who served for only five years and deployed once on a six-month tour to Latvia. I never planned on the CAF being a lifelong career, and without significant bills to pay or a family to support, I always had the option to leave.
I'm here because I believe I can offer the perspective of someone who has had a foot in both worlds—as an operational soldier for a time and as a student and advocate whose work has largely centred on discrimination in the CAF.
In this opening statement, I aim to speak mostly about the two most formative experiences I had in the CAF, mainly my BMQ, or basic military qualification, and my pre-deployment and deployment experiences.
I joined the primary army reserves when I was 18 years old. I completed my BMQ and BMQ-L by 19 and my trades training by 20, and I was deployed when I was 21 years old. I released last year at age 23.
In the lead-up to my BMQ course, I was posted to a base on general duty as an untrained private while I awaited my course start date. During this time, a significantly older service member—a man—made unwanted advances at me, referencing an Asian fetish that he had. This person also made jokes about keeping child pornography on his computer. Someone other than me reported him. However, as the victim of interest, I was the one whom the report focused on specifically from that point on. The officer I spoke to told me I would be asked to testify at a proceeding for the incident and that I should not speak to this person any longer.
As far as I know, there was never a charge and there was never any follow-up with me. At the time, this service member was punished by being assigned meal hall duty, where he would count service members as they came in for their daily meals. This meant that I saw him three times a day, every day, when he tried to talk to me. I later learned this was not his first offence. He was described, generally, as a “crazy but harmless” soldier whom people just learned to tolerate. This all happened to me during my first full-time work in the CAF.
During this time, I was introduced to the military culture I would spend the rest of my career trying to push back against—the culture that called the knee pad inserts that went into our trousers “promotion pads”, that had male staff in my basic training discussing plans to sleep with certain female students after the course was over, and that has an incredible tolerance for discrimination and sexual violence.
There was an attempted rape in camp during the first couple of weeks that I was deployed in Latvia. The victim was a Canadian woman who, while only seeing the rapist in the dark and from the back as he ran away, believed him to be a Canadian man. For my rotation, there were 500-some Canadian soldiers on base, but only the 30 or so Canadian women were talked to about this event. The proposed solution by the command team was to employ a buddy system among women soldiers and to discontinue use of the all-gender sauna. The men in the battle group, as far as I'm aware, were never spoken to about this incident.
In Latvia, I repeatedly heard my male colleagues and even superiors talk openly about their fantasies or the sexual experiences they'd had with women soldiers around the camp. I heard my female colleague get told to “not play the gender card” while she was bringing up concerns she had to her male superior. I heard one of my male colleagues talk about a Snapchat group where men from his regiment shared photos of themselves wearing their regimental caps during sex, at times without the knowledge or consent of the women involved in the sex they were having. One male colleague of mine, during our pre-deployment training, consistently overstepped articulated boundaries I had set, including groping me, especially during events where drinking was involved, of which there were many.
During my deployment and also during my career, I heard countless stories of soldiers committing or attempting to commit sexual assault against either civilians or female service members. Even after these events came to light or were reported, many of them were simply moved to other units or, at worst, demoted one rank.
There seems to be doublethink present in the minds of a lot of male Canadian soldiers: Sexual misconduct issues are being “shoved down their throats” and this whole topic in the CAF has created a witch hunt, but at the same time, I believe there's a general attitude of being able to get away with such acts of sexual violence because this has so consistently been the case with the people and stories we hear about every day in the workplace.
The majority of women I've met in the CAF have experienced some form of sexual harassment or assault in their career. Someone very close to me was sexually assaulted during her trades training course. Despite going through the arduous, oftentimes belittling process of reporting, she continues to work with her assaulter on a near-daily basis.
Throughout my career, I've heard different men of almost every rank talk about how they feel women deserve the hardship they go through in the military. There's an unequivocal attitude that we as women are just barely tolerated guests in this men's domain. The best of us—by that I mean the most agreeable, the ones who can navigate the rape jokes, sexualized culture and misogyny with grace and humour—are bestowed the ultimate honour for a woman in the military: being one of the boys.
I feel that there is a general deep incompetency of most military leaders to deal with sexual violence in their ranks. I also perceive a deep unwillingness to do so as well. I see and have felt a deep pressure to not report, and I've seen and felt a deep incapacity of this organization to deal with the cases of the people who do step forward.
To close, I want to share two journal entries of mine that I found while preparing for this witness testimony. The first is from about halfway through my deployment. It reads:
Now here I am. Over halfway through a 6-month deployment, and I’ve grown so accustomed to melancholy. It feels normal to me. There are always good moments of course (especially when I drink). But generally I am sad. I feel defeated by this institution most days. I think a lot about what its going to be like that first time I am back home and sit down at Rachel’s place surrounded by my friends and I’ll unpack what this experience has been like. And its going to be heartbreaking, for them too I know. To confess how unhappy I’ve been, but mostly how ashamed they would have been with me if they saw how much of a bystander I was, how silent I was for so many hateful moments. But I think its even more challenging to reflect on what kind of person I will be after all this – how this will change me in a way that will show forever. I think, to some degree, I will always carry this defeat. This loss of faith in something I once really believed in, this disenchantment with the organization and the belief in the potential for things to get better. I guess that’s all just growing up, but a lot of growing up has happened in these 3 months. And I think when you have to grow up fast, you grow up a little different than had you otherwise would have given the grace of time.
The second entry is much shorter, and it's from much later, after I got back from Latvia. It reads:
It’s been a year since I’ve returned home from Latvia. These [entries] aren’t about that experience anymore, which is crazy to say. For a time it felt like life would always be relative to that experience. And that’s not to say that I’ve reclaimed the woman I was and the qualities I had before I left. In fact, I am slowly coming to terms with the possibility that I may never see that girl again. That I may never get my mojo back. And I have been making peace with that. I am not all the way there yet, but I am making my way.
Thank you.
