Sexual offences committed by members of the armed forces: Is the service justice system fit for purpose?
Abstract: Recent policy reviews, academic research and high-profile media critiques have repeatedly emphasised the UK military as a hypermasculine culture, seemingly permissive of sexual violence, marked by high prevalence of sexual offences and inadequate justice response. The service justice system has been characterised by low conviction rates and poor treatment of victim-survivors of sexual offences, prompting recommendations that rape should be tried in the civilian criminal justice system rather than the service justice system. Despite notable debate on this matter, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) ultimately rejected this recommendation in December 2021 and instead committed to implementing clear and meaningful change within the service justice system response to sexual offences. In light of this decision, this article interrogates available data about the current service justice system response to sexual offending, and lessons that may be learnt from the civilian criminal justice system, to highlight current obstacles to justice and outline areas in which further research and scrutiny is necessary.
Abstract: One of the key achievements of Forces in Mind Trust’s (FiMT) Our Community - Our Covenant series of reports, beginning in 2016, has been to establish a toolkit for local authorities to help them develop support for their local Armed Forces Community (AFC). The 2016 report launched the idea of a “core infrastructure”, supported by self-assessment questions and some wider tips. Formal research and informal engagement show that the toolkit still provides an important contribution to successful local delivery of Covenant pledges and wider AFC support. It’s a baseline in the face of ever-present funding stresses and a point of reference when there are changes in member and officer responsibilities. This means it is important that the toolkit remains up to date. It was last reviewed in 2022 and presented as an Annex to FiMT’s research report A Decade of the Covenant. Since then, there has been further research into local support for the Armed Forces Community for the next iteration of the Our Community - Our Covenant series. This updated toolkit reflects these recent findings about local practice as well as developments following the introduction in the Armed Forces Act 2021 of the duty of due regard to the principles of the Covenant in the focus areas of housing, education and healthcare. As with the original document, the toolkit remains targeted at local authorities. It covers their own direct role in supporting the local AFC, but also the crucial activity of convening local partnerships and so enabling effective local collaborative action. The key changes to the core infrastructure and self-assessment cover: (1) More emphasis on embedding AFC support into the mainstream of local authority work. (2) An extended top tips section with more advice based on recent research. (3) We have dropped the descriptive scenarios of challenges that members of the AFC face. These have now been overtaken by analytical scenarios included in the freely available national training material and in the Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) Covenant Legal Duty toolkit, which helps to explain the legal duty aspect of the Covenant. (4) Some additional material about the individual roles, collaboration, communication and vision and commitment elements of the core infrastructure. This toolkit update is being made in spring 2025 at a time when further change in the Covenant environment is likely, with potential extension of the Covenant duty and expected re-organisation in English local government and creation of new combined or strategic authorities. Additional modules could be added to the toolkit to reflect these ongoing policy developments.