A Canadian Perspective on Military Sexual Trauma

by Claire Cookson-Hills, PhD

When I met Veteran and advocate Marie-Claude Gagnon at a conference in Waterloo, she used a term to describe sexual violence that I had never heard before: military sexual trauma (MST). She used it to describe the impact of a sexual abuse and harassment by members of a military against colleagues. 

According to the U.S. Veterans’ Affairs website, MST is “sexual assault or harassment experienced during military service. MST includes any sexual activity that you are involved with against your will.” The VA closely connects it with mental health.

The concept of MST highlights the long-term, holistic consequences of the betrayal, pain, and loss of trust that sexual misconduct and sexual harassment cause. As a term, it resonated with Marie-Claude, and the support group she founded, It’s Just 700, accepts it.

Canadian academics, especially Maya Eichler, are also using this term, and it is gaining traction in military medical circles. For instance, the 2013 Canadian Forces Mental Health Survey included MST as a category of mental health. 

But, if military sexual trauma is an American term, what does it mean in a Canadian context? Is MST defined holistically, or narrowly? 

What is the impact of MST on women personnel and veterans of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF)? 

I conducted a literature review in academic online databases. Because MST is an American term, American results flooded my search lists. As well, most of the literature about Canadian servicewomen’s MST relied on American data and sources to help fill in the gaps.

I analyzed my sample using the Canadian Army’s Integrated Performance Strategy (CAIPS). I used CAIPS because it had the Canadian-centric holistic framework I needed, distanced itself from loaded terms like “mental health,” and described 6 domains of support a soldier needs to be effective. 

The 6 domains are:

·       Emotional fitness: regulating emotions positively, maintaining self-control, stamina, and mental balance; 

·       Physical fitness: the ability to physically perform military duties without undue fatigue or injury;

·       Social fitness: maintaining identity, having healthy relationships and friendships; 

·       Spiritual fitness: core identity and a guiding sense of purpose;  

·       Familial fitness: being a member of a resilient, loving family, and the family has enough resources to deal with challenges. 

·      Intellectual fitness: the ability to grow and learn within a chosen career.

I was looking for discussions of the ways that MST affected servicewomen and veterans across these domains. CAIPS’ domains use positive language and describing fitness success. In the context of MST, I associated those domains with the loss of fitness. 

Overall, Canadian academic publications overwhelmingly focus on the loss of social fitness as the key impact of MST. The loss of social fitness was associated with two levels of military leadership:

·      At the unit level, with the personal challenges of servicewomen facing social isolation, ostracism, and retributive harassment or bullying after experiencing and/or reporting military sexual trauma. 

·      At the leadership level, with the failures of the CAF leadership to modify military culture and prevent further MST.

While emotional fitness appeared almost as frequently as a loss of social fitness, it was mostly as a secondary or tertiary element. Emotional fitness was especially associated with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety.  

Finally, familial fitness represented a small but significant discussion. MST was both the cause of familial distress and the outcome of domestic violence against servicewomen by their (usually male) military spouses.

There was an overwhelming research focus on serving military personnel. The lack of comprehensive research about the impacts of MST on Canadian veterans is probably related to the difficulties sampling this population, their reluctance to speak on this topic, their reluctance to speak to researchers, or a combination of the above. Whatever the reason, female veterans are an understudied population when it comes to MST. 

Overall, the Canadian research demonstrated a clear set of research priorities about MST: social, emotional, and familial loss of fitness. The research almost ignored the physical, intellectual, and spiritual impacts on fitness. 

I associated loss of physical fitness due to MST with sexually transmitted diseases, rape-induced trauma, pregnancy, and termination of pregnancy. This silence might be because most sexual assaults remain underreported, because MST includes a wide range of traumas, and because Canadian scholars adapted the American VA model of MST as an issue of mental health. 

I associated loss of intellectual fitness to job loss and educational and training failure. The single article that discussed the effects of military sexual harassment on female Royal Military Cadets was explicit: their grades suffered. 

But it was the idea of spiritual fitness that was almost completely silent in the literature. As spiritual fitness was about beliefs and guiding morality, I associated loss of spiritual fitness with moral injury, loss of life purpose, and anomie. B.L. Kitchen’s thesis “Ma’am, Yes Ma’am” highlighted the impact on female soldiers of listening to their male colleagues discuss raping other women – it was a moral injury.

This blogpost is adapted from Dr. Claire Cookson-Hills’s preliminary report on the state of the literature on military sexual trauma in Canada. More is to come on the topic.