How can you tell if a rotten institution really wants to change after a tragedy? Is it the admission of failure, the apology to a bereaved family, or the promise that toxic cultures are already being addressed?
If those were the signs of real change, then perhaps the family of Gunner Jaysley Beck would be able to rest assured that the Army really is going to learn the lessons it failed to before her suicide in 2021.
They’re not reassured, though, and they’re right not to be.
An inquest this week found that the 19 year old took her own life in 2021 after a “systemic failure” by the military which may have breached her “right to life”. She had felt unable to complain about a campaign of harassment by one of her superiors after the Army had failed to investigate a sexual assault complaint she had made against another soldier. She had filed a complaint against 39-year-old Battery Sergeant Major Michael Webber after he “pinned her down” and allegedly tried to kiss her.
Instead of starting an investigation, Captain James Hook, who organised the training exercise where Jaysley was allegedly assaulted, thought she might have been trying to “generate a situation” and get out of the exercise by making a complaint.
Beck was then harassed by her line manager, Bombardier Ryan Mason, who sent her more than 4,600 messages and shared a 15-page “love story” of his “fantasies about her”.
The Army’s response after the coroner’s ruling was to accept that “we should have done so much more to support and protect her”. The official statement also argued there had been “significant changes” in the Army since Gunner Beck died, including “the introduction of clear and unequivocal policies to state that there will be zero tolerance to unacceptable behaviour”, but that more needed to be done to ensure soldiers can be confident about reporting sexual offences.
But Gunner Beck’s family aren’t satisfied with that, and they’re right to be suspicious. Her mother said the Army should “not be allowed to investigate itself any more when it comes to cases of sexual harassment, bullying and abuse”. Her sister accused the Army of having “blood on its hands” for the way it swept her complaint under the carpet, adding: “It needed to be handled by the police. That could have ultimately left us with Jaysley still here today.”
The family want an independent body to investigate allegations in the Army. It’s hardly the only institution that has, over many years, insisted it can handle its own problems, often using its special status as a justification for keeping things in house.
The Church of England has also recently had to confront the possibility that it might not be able to deal with safeguarding internally after repeatedly mishandling its own child sexual abuse scandals. Like the Army, it had also indulged itself with the notion that it was better than wider society, and all the wisdom for dealing with complaints could be found inside the organisation, not outside.
Yet this belief is also highly convenient for perpetrators of abuse, as it allows them to exploit one of the common flaws of human nature. We find it hard to believe allegations made against people we know and have a degree of professional respect for. That’s quite natural.
It is also a very human instinct to want to cover up even small mistakes, pretending that we are on top of matters rather than accepting that we might not know everything or be capable of getting everything totally right all the time.
The bigger the mistake, of course, the greater the incentive for someone to want to pretend that they didn’t make it, not only to avoid getting into trouble but also so they can live with themselves and deny their responsibility.
We see that pattern of behaviour regularly in healthcare, where professionals have to be able to separate themselves from the often devastating consequences of their mistakes so that they can live with themselves, but must be prevented from denying that they had a responsibility at all. If there isn’t a system that in effect militates against human nature’s desire to cover up, then cover-ups will happen.
Of course, what is also clear from the evidence at Jaysley’s inquest and from testimony online from more than 1,000 women via an anonymous military social media account, Fill Your Boots, is that there was – and there still is – a culture of misogyny in the Armed Forces. Everything is told in the present tense, not the past of three years ago, as the Army wanted to suggest.
It wasn’t just that soldiers who respected each other found it initially hard to believe that one of their number had allegedly assaulted Gunner Beck. It was also that they seemingly didn’t value the word of a woman enough to check, or even worse, that they thought women should have to put up with unacceptable or even criminal behaviour as a price of being in the Army.
The real test of whether an institution wants to change doesn’t come in the list of things it provides as proof it is changing. It doesn’t even come in the admission of “we got things wrong” in the past tense. It is in the acceptance that things will go wrong again in the future. That’s a painful thing for any institution to face up to. But it is the only real chance of change.
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of ‘The Spectator’ magazine
Comments
Leave a Comment