Status of Violence Against Women in the CAF: “Not a Lot of Progress has Been Made”

 by Allan English

I titled my contribution to last year’s 16 Days Campaign of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, “Accountability: Why Operation Honour Has Failed.” In it, I argued that the main reason for Operation Honour’s failure was that the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) was unwilling or unable to implement the “comprehensive cultural change” that Justice Marie Deschamps, the author of the 2015 “External Review into Sexual Misconduct and Sexual Harassment in the Canadian Armed Forces,” said was necessary to transform the “underlying sexualized culture in the CAF that is hostile to women and LGTBQ members” - the source of much of the sexual misconduct in the CAF. 

Since then, events have confirmed the CAF’s inability to change its culture. This was confirmed by Justice Deschamps in her 2018 Senate testimony. When asked whether the CAF had implemented her report “in a rigorous and determined way,” she replied that “…not a lot of progress has been made.” Her comments were reinforced by General Vance, the Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS), in a September 2019 interview where he acknowledged that shortly after its launch Operation Honour prioritized “victim support” over preventing misconduct through culture change, and that he was surprised that his solution to ending sexual misconduct in the CAF, ordering people to stop the misconduct, did not work. Statistics Canada reported in 2018, the year after Operation Honour ended its active phase (2017), that regular-force CAF members reported about 900 sexual assaults, approximately the same number as in 2016 and almost double that in the general population. Equally troubling was an internal Department of National Defence (DND) report based on data collected in early 2018, but not released until 2020, despite repeated requests for it, which concluded that some survivors of sexual misconduct still reported being bullied, harassed and singled out by superior officers and they complained of having been “abandoned by the chain of command, — despite high-profile assurances to the contrary” from senior military leaders. The report concluded that: "Unfortunately, many participants in this study described feeling unsupported because of interactions with individuals in their chain of command following an incident of sexual misconduct, regardless of whether the incident took place before or after Operation HONOUR."

Part of the reason for the lack of an effective culture change strategy to guide Operation Honour was the high turnover in senior leaders charged with creating and implementing the strategy. In that in original operation order, the CDS required the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff (VCDS) to provide a strategy for Operation Honour one month after its launch in August 2015. In the five years since then there have been seven VCDSs (about one every nine months) and four leaders of the various organizations taking the lead in the execution of Operation Honour. As a result of the turnover in senior leaders and staff responsible for Operation Honour and the lack of a strategy, its implementation was a series of un-coordinated, unprioritized culture change activities that did little to address the underlying causes of the CAF’s sexualized culture. 

A strategy was finally released in the fall of 2020, not long after Operation Honour’s functions were “re-absorbed” into the Department of National Defence bureaucracy, becoming part of the Directorate Professional Military Conduct. The new Sexual Misconduct Response Strategy may be a fitting epitaph for Operation Honour, but it is unlikely to provide an “effective, fully coordinated, and sustained institutional approach…to address sexual misconduct” in the CAF, as it states. There are a number of reasons for this. First, like the CAF’s “Diversity Strategy,” to which it refers, the Sexual Misconduct Response Strategy offers bewildering detail of how its aims are to be achieved, with actions assigned to numerous organizations inside and outside DND, but it holds no central organization responsible for the execution of and accountable for the success of the strategy. 

Second, the new Sexual Misconduct Response Strategy tells us that “it is necessary to take immediate steps to develop and implement enduring plans that take a holistic approach to realigning our culture.” (p. 22, emphasis added) This sounds quite different from the call by Justice Deschamps in her report to implement “comprehensive cultural change.” In merely calling for a “realignment” of CAF culture, the sexual misconduct response strategy seems to echo the words of General Vance’s predecessor as CDS, General Tom Lawson, who, referring to Justice Deschamps’ comments on CAF culture in April 2015, was quoted as saying, “I do not accept from any quarter that this type of behaviour is part of our military culture.” 

Third, the Sexual Misconduct Response Strategy fails to address systemic issues in the CAF, like posting practices and reward systems, that contribute to the toleration and perpetuation of the “underlying sexualized culture in the CAF.” 

While it may seem ironic that the strategy came out after Operation Honour had effectively ended, even if it had been presented earlier, Operation Honour would probably have failed as the strategy proposes using many of the same methods that led to the failure of Operation Minerva and other activities to effect CAF culture change in the 1990s. Therefore, unless the CAF adopts effective culture change activities and addresses the causes of sexual misconduct in its ranks, not just its symptoms, the CAF is likely to face future problems as its sexualized, toxic culture remains in place.

Some References Used

A CBC interview with the CDS given on 4 Sep 19 “Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Jonathan Vance | Power Lunch” at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/powerandpolitics/chief-of-defence-staff-gen-jonathan-vance-power-lunch-1.5270949?fbclid=IwAR0tJwN6km9wu_EfndcGQ4N34DZNtegxzeZRnd4TLmtA77JSbEYtk-gi2MI

“Experiences of CAF members affected by sexual misconduct: Perceptions of support,” DND Scientific Letter at https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/benefits-military/conflict-misconduct/operation-honour/research-data-analysis/op-honour-research-program/perceptions-support.html 

The Path to Dignity and Respect: The Canadian Armed Forces Sexual Misconduct Response Strategy at https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/corporate/reports-publications/the-path-to-dignity-and-respect.html