The CAF Progress on Implementing Women, Peace, and Security
By Dr. Allan English
Background.
The preliminary material in the Status of Women Canada (SWC) progress report 2017/18 give this background information on SWC’s role in Canada’s National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security 2017-2022 (emphasis added):
Status of Women Canada (SWC) works particularly closely with the lead Action Plan partner departments Global Affairs Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Department of National Defence (DND) and the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) to increase their capacity to apply a gender and diversity lens to their policies, plans and operations.
SWC is leading the development and implementation of Canada’s Strategy to Address and Prevent Gender-Based Violence (Canada’s GBV Strategy), in which DND/CAF and the RCMP are partners. In conjunction with Canada’s GBV Strategy, SWC is supporting Action Plan lead partners on internal cultural change initiatives geared to increasing the number of women who are able to deploy in support of peace operations. Specifically:
SWC has been actively supporting the RCMP and DNA/CAF in developing their internal capacity to apply Gender-based Analysis Plus (GBA+) to their internal policies, decision-making, plans and programs, all in support of their internal culture-change initiatives. This has included the collaborative development of advanced GBA+ training for policy personnel.
But...
In November 2019, the Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS), Gen. Jonathan Vance, admitted that over four years after he accepted that “comprehensive culture change” was necessary to address sexual misconduct in the CAF, there is still no strategy, or “blueprint” as he puts it, to make that change. Op Honour is another example of CAF major change or “transformation” that has failed due to a lack of an overarching plan or strategy to guide other activities or “tactics.” The inability of the CAF to learn from over 30 years of failed change initiatives when enthusiastically launching new ones is a classic example of defining success as going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.
In short, over the past 30 years, the CAF has been unwilling or unable to make the culture change required to address the issue of GBV in its ranks. The SWC in its report seems to be unaware of this fact.
Virtually all the DND/CAF actions described in the SWC report are high visibility-low impact bureaucratic measures, which in the past 30 years have failed to address effectively the issue of GBV in the CAF.
It is blatant in the “Canada’s National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security 2017-2022 - Department of National Defence and The Canadian Armed Forces - Progress report for fiscal year 2017/2018.”
The fact that SWC shows no awareness of CAF problems in culture change related to GBV is apparent in this report. The SWC report accepts uncritically DND/CAF reports of their GBV prevention activities and ignores reports by the Auditor General on them that call the effectiveness of DND/CAF activities into question. A number of Statistics Canada reports between 2016 and 2018 confirm the criticism of DND/CAF in the AG reports. The SWC report does not reference the Statistics Canada reports.
DETAILED COMMENTS ON SELECTED DND/CAF POINTS IN THE REPORT (EXCERPTS FROM THE SWC REPORT IN ITALICS)
SWC Consultation on GBA+ “tools”
“The Government of Canada’s Action Plan on GBA+ includes the requirement for SWC to consult departments on the creation and/or updating of tools such as a GBA+ guide and GBA+ training.”
The SWC seems to have accepted without comment DND’s account of what actions have been taken but there seems to be no audit activities by SWC to ensure that the actions have actually had an effect.
DND summary of activities on GBA+ can be found here.
Other related initiatives by DND/CAF include:
- Continued support for all CAF members as part of Operation HONOUR to eliminate harmful and inappropriate sexual behavior within the CAF;
- Continued support for and monitoring of Sexual Misconduct Response Centre (SMRC) activities, as part of Operation HONOUR;
- Continued training and access to educational tools and resources, as well as continued monitoring of performance management towards culture change and accountability by the CAF Strategic Response Team for Sexual Misconduct; and
- Continued funding to Family Crisis Teams at DND/CAF through SWC’s GBV Strategy.
The activities of Family Crisis Teams at DND/CAF in the last bullet are quite invisible, but here are comments on the first three bullets:)
1. As the CDS has admitted, the CAF and DND bureaucracy has absorbed Op Honour, and it has not achieved its objective to “eliminate harmful and inappropriate sexual behaviour within the CAF.” Furthermore, Op Honour’s failure to address the causes of this behaviour through “comprehensive culture change” virtually guarantees that after Op Honour is forgotten, like Op Minerva in the 1990s, another series of scandals, like the “Rape Crises” the CF came across in the past, will sadly happen again;
2. The focus on victim support through the SMRC is commendable but does not address the issue of preventing GBV in the CAF. Even with this declared focus on victim support, in 2018 the Auditor General found that “the Canadian Armed Forces did not always resolve reported cases of inappropriate sexual behaviour in a timely, consistent, and respectful manner…As a result, some victims did not report or they withdrew their complaints, and they had less confidence that the investigations would produce any tangible results" (“2018 Fall Reports of the Auditor General of Canada,” para 5.42). Note also that, as detailed below, the CAF appears to rely on civilian resources to support survivors of sexual assault in crisis;
3. The Auditor General concluded in his 2018 report that the CAF’s “policies, education and training about sexual misconduct training” were “not adequate” and “did not increase members' understanding of how to respond to and support victims…but instead created confusion, frustration, fear, and less camaraderie.". The SWC did not mention this in its report.
Other related initiatives by CAF/DND have yield the following results:
- Action is being taken on every allegation of sexual misconduct. Since Operation HONOUR began, the number of charges related to sexual assault in the CAF has nearly tripled, from an average of 11% in 2015 to 31% in 2017 and 58 members have been released from the CAF after being found guilty of offences related to sexual misconduct.
These statistics, absent context, present a misleading impression of the effectiveness of the CAF’s military justice activities to deal with sexual misconduct in its ranks as this media report details:
The auditor reviewed 46 military police files and 29 military career administration files and looked at the impact on victims who had either come forward or had incidents reported for them by a third party.
“In 21 of the 53 cases, the file showed that the victim experienced fear, distress, discomfort, a lack of support, reprisal, or blame, including from the victim's commanding officer, senior leaders, instructors, and colleagues," said the audit.
"In addition to the psychological trauma, such outcomes can only reduce victims' confidence in the system and contribute to the belief that there are negative consequences for those who report inappropriate sexual behaviour."
In four of the instances, the cases were reported by the commanding officer of an individual even though that person did not want to make a complaint.
Source: “Victims of sexual misconduct not treated in 'respectful manner' by military, says auditor,” CBC News at https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/military-sexual-abuse-1.4912805; see also “2018 Fall Reports of the Auditor General of Canada,” para 5.61 at https://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_201811_05_e_43203.html)
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