Given the hierarchy of military organizations, I assume there is enormous potential for abusive treatment. Famously, this crops up in fiction, and infamously there are well-documented cases of sexual harassment.
My question: what systems do uniformed services use to reduce abuse by superiors of their workers? I am particularly interested in reporting systems to reduce abuse and protection for those using them. However, I am not primarily interested in sexual harassment, but measures related to that are worth noting. Instead, I am interested in abusive treatment such as bullying (a rather vague term, I know), verbal abuse, providing poor evaluations that other experienced supervisors may view as very undeserved, etc.
NOTE: When answering, please mention what country and what force you are basing your answer on. Thanks.
United States, applies to all branches of the military.
A service member has a few options. There’s the chain of command, meaning your commanding officer has a commanding officer and that commanding officer has a commanding officer. Another option is the Inspector General. A third choice is to speak to a military chaplain. Finally, there is always the letter to one’s congressperson.
IIRC, derogatory information or marks on an evaluation or fitness report must be substantiated with actual documentation, not just “Seaman Brutus is a slacker”.
There have been a few instances recently where commanding officers and senior enlisted advisors have been relieved of command or position due to their abusive behavior of subordinates.
These are all covered in a few sources: law, regulation, and service policy.
I was in the US Navy. We routinely had training on ways to report sexual abuse, either via your chain of command (who are instructed to take reports seriously) or bypassing your chain of command by talking to medical personnel, SARC (Sexual Assault Response Coordinator), or SAPR (Sexual Assault Prevention and Response) victim advocate. Chaplains often take on SARC or SAPR duties.
IIRC, reporting it to the chain of command means everything will be conducted in the open and your identity as a victim will not be protected. Reporting it to any of the other options I listed means you will get support but your superiors will only be informed that someone in their command made a report, your identity and details will be protected.
For non-sexual abuse, the standard is to report it up the chain of command. On my boat these were taken so seriously that there were instances of hazing-type abuse where everyone involved was fine with it but the hammer came down once the CO found out about it. It was taken care of via NJP (Non-judicial punishment, called Captain’s Mast in the Navy). If nobody up to your commanding officer gives a shit about it, you can go above them to the regional commanders or go to the inspector general.
As a psychologist, I worked with a number of women who were sexually assaulted by their superior officers or peers, and little was done except to hound them out of their careers. Those who were able to press their complaint were reviled and sometimes further assaulted by their peers. When some became suicidal, they spent time in psychiatric hospitals and returned to the civilian world shattered by PTSD.
In the US Army, your boss’s boss is never too far away. Neither is the boss’s boss’s boss. Plus, you have two parrellel channels of bosses–the chain of command and the NCO support channel. A person likely has daily ibteraction with his/her boss’s two bosses and the bosses of those two bosses.
If someone does not want to go through those most common avenues, there are other options that WILL result in some type of action. At a minimum, someone will look into the allegations. Those options are:
Inspector General
Chaplain
Congressman (yes, Soldiers start Congressionals all the time)
SARC/SHARP/ Victim Advocate (If abuse is sexual)
Equal Opportunity Rep (If abuse is due to race, sex, gender or other protected status)
Military Police / CID (depending on the type of abuse we’re talking about)
Local Law Enforcement (depending on the type of abuse)
UK: The Ministry of Defence has a whole load of relevant policy/procedure documents and free hotlines to report misbehaviour, as well as the “usual channels”. How seriously complaints are taken presumably depend on the individuals on the chain, but we do see occasional media reports of disciplinary action and criminal charges:
REf @susan’s expert report. The DoD system is far from perfect. And almost certainly better now than it was in my ancient era 40 years ago when concern over all this was gathering steam.
I will suggest that your patients are self-selected to be the ones who did get utterly mistreated by both whoever abused them, and the rest of the system that chose, in their case, to do comprehensively the wrong thing.
The other side of the equation is the mistreated folks whose cases were handled correctly, and the even larger number of cases that never happened at all because the old culture and habit of impunity had been damped down by all the efforts against it.
It’s logically correct and morally appropriate to rail against each and every failure. But it’s logically incorrect to conclude that because failures exist, there are no (or very few) successes.
I’m not suggesting @susan has done that. But readers might jump from one conclusion to the other.
I completely agree. Just identifying that people exist whose trauma has been made much worse by the system they trusted, and who aren’t accounted for by a description of the chain of command that is supposed to protect them.
It is a tragedy that is still going on at all, much less in quantity. The US Military is about 1.4 million full time servicemembers, plus another 400,000 in the active Guard and active Reserves. Even a small problem percentage-wise adds up to a big number quantity-wise.
Isn’t this the case with every organization, not just the military? Reporting offenses against ones self by your superiors, or the organizaton, will effectively blacklist you. this is especially true when the offenders are well liked, get results, curry freindships with the higher-ups, etc. A person gets labelled a trouble-maker, others are guns-shy to have them in their organization for fear that they are not victims but compulsive complainers. The military just has a lot more control over who what when and where.
You’re right it’s the default collective organizational behavior of organizations run as if they were high school cliques.
Conversely, professionally managed organizations kill all that toxic crap dead. When politicking is a firing offense, not a route to the C-suite, you see performance, not politics.
The problem is that only a tiny fraction of human organizations are actually professionally run. Despite the far more common pious platitudes of their leadership and their HR departments.
At least in my era, DOD was far, far more professionally run than anything I ever saw in commerce. Whether small biz or Fortune 500.
I hope this isn’t too off topic to the question asked by the OP, but I thought it could be useful and in one case timely to give a couple of examples where cultures of abuse exist or have existed in militaries and were formally or informally accepted by the powers that be and prove/proved resistant to attempts to change them.
The Soviet military and the current Russian military have a serious problem with what is known as Dedovshchina ( ‘reign of grandfathers’). In the post-WWII Soviet military conscription occurred every 6 months with conscripts serving a two-year term, resulting in four ‘classes’ of conscripts based on their time in service. The longer serving would abuse the shorter serving conscripts, and those who had just completed their first six months of service would vent the trauma they had undergone by dishing it out to the newest batch of conscripts just starting their service. The hazing is serious enough to result in both actual deaths from abuse as well as a substantial suicide rate:
Many young men are killed or commit suicide every year because of dedovshchina.[5][6]The New York Times reported that in 2006 at least 292 Russian soldiers were killed by dedovshchina (although the Russian military only admits that 16 soldiers were directly murdered by acts of dedovshchina and claims that the rest committed suicide).[7] The Times states: “On Aug. 4, it was announced by the chief military prosecutor that there had been 3,500 reports of abuse already this year (2006), compared with 2,798 in 2005”. The BBC meanwhile reports that in 2007, 341 soldiers committed suicide, a 15% reduction on the previous year.[8]
In 2012, a draftee from Chelyabinsk region, Ruslan Aiderkhanov, was tortured to death by his seniors.[9] The one witness who was willing to testify against the alleged perpetrators, Danil Chalkin, was later found shot dead in his military base. A contract soldier, Alikbek Musabekov, was later arrested in this incident.[10]
In 2019, according to the Russian military prosecutor office the situation with dedovshchina is getting worse. Incidents of hazing in the army during 2019 have increased. 51,000 human rights violations and 1,521 sexual assault cases.[11] In the same year, Ramil Shamsutdinov shot 10 of his colleagues at a Gorny military base, 8 of them fatally. In court, he alleged that he was subjected to beatings and threats of anal rape.
The other example is the Imperial Japanese Army prior to and during WWII, where a culture existed where it was an accepted practice for superiors to beat their subordinates as punishment for real or imagined offenses. This was so serious and prevalent that it is considered one of the reasons behind why so many war crimes were committed by the IJA during WWII.
One major reason that the IJA exhibited such brutality towards foreign civilians, prisoners of war, and soldiers stemmed from the fact that Japanese soldiers were treated equally harshly in training. Japanese recruits would be beaten, given unnecessarily strenuous duty tasks, insufficient food, and other violent or harsh disciplinary tactics, and so Japanese soldiers were simply reciprocating the behavior they had experienced themselves.