When violence comes home
Report of a seminar on soldiers and violence at home
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is under fire from a former government advisor who accuses its senior officials of failing to tackle domestic violence in the armed forces. Davina James-Hanman said that the ‘upper echelons of the MoD’ are not taking the problem seriously.
Davina, the founder of Against Violence and Abuse, was seconded to the Home Office for a year to assist with the development of the first cross-government strategy for tackling violence against women and girls. She told the Fox report that she had tried to work with the MoD ‘with whom I got absolutely nowhere’ and who had not cooperated with other government departments or external agencies.
She said that early on in the process, a senior MoD official told her that there had been no problems with domestic violence until ‘they let foreigners join’. The official had responsibility for coordinating the MoD’s contributions to the government’s strategy for tackling violence against women. When told of a support website set up by an officer’s wife, he responded in an email – ‘I’m not interested in the stories of bitter old women.’ On another occasion he told Davina that she should address the problem of ‘Scottish wives beating up their husbands’.
Although all government departments were expected to work together on the strategy, MoD staff failed to make any commitments until late on in the process, when they said that they would review their own policy by the end of June 2010. A revised policy has not yet been published.
Undisputed statistics about domestic violence by military personnel are impossible to come by, as critics and defenders of the armed forces tend to accuse each other of bias. An academic study (Heyman and Neidig) in 1999 found that incidences of ‘severe domestic aggression’ were over three times higher in the army sample they studied than in the comparable civilian sample, although rates for ‘moderate’ aggression were roughly equal.
Growing awareness of the problem has led to a response from armed forces welfare staff, who insist that they regard domestic violence as a priority. Despite her criticisms of the MoD, Davina maintains that, ‘In the armed forces themselves, there’s a lot of good work going on’.
But some professionals are more critical of the forces’ role, it emerged at a recent seminar on domestic abuse in military families at Coventry University. It included staff from the army, navy and air force, as well as numerous probation staff, police officers, researchers, charity employees and mental health professionals – but the MoD was the only major agency to be conspicuously absent.
A probation officer, who did not wish to be named, told the Fox report that an army base in her area produces far fewer reports of domestic violence than the civilian population. She accused the army of ‘closing ranks’ to protect its members’ reputations.
Staff at other bases seem keener to act. Senior officers at Catterick Garrison in North Yorkshire recently gave the go-ahead for the Probation Service to run a programme for soldiers who have perpetrated domestic violence, based on a similar programme run for perpetrators in the general population.
One probation officer delivering the programme is a former RAF officer. He told the seminar that some soldiers attributed their violent behaviour to their military training. He disputed this argument. ‘I’ve been trained to be aggressive,’ he said. ‘I’ve trained other soldiers and young men to be aggressive. But I didn’t train anyone to hit their partner.’
His denial was almost the only point in the seminar in which the possibility was raised of a link between military culture and domestic abuse. Questions on possible links between militarism and domestic violence went unanswered.
One of the recurring themes of the seminar – while not listed on the programme – was the anger that many professionals felt towards the MoD. A police officer working on domestic abuse accused the MoD of playing down the problem, saying he had found that the MoD, especially the MoD police, ‘minimised everything’.
The absence of the MoD, in the eyes of many of those present, bore silent witness to a major part of the problem.
The MoD has not responded to our request for a comment.
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