Sexual Misconduct in the Armed Forces

I wonder about this when you have men and women who are on the front lines, and they're putting their life at risk. And they've been there for like a week and a half. I used to think this about the oil riggers in Alberta too. They go off, and they have a couple of days off, and they want to blow off some steam, and so they have a rius party. And rius parties are where stupid things happen. But having said that, I don't exactly understand how much steam you do have to blow off in order to be able to tolerate the life that you're leading. That high stress, anything is possible at a moment's notice life.

And so I don't know how much off-duty discipline, let's say, it's reasonable and realistic to insist upon. Now, you know I've already said I know what alcohol contributes to these sorts of situations. But by the same token, you know, it's like how much do people need to let off steam? And so I'm kind of curious about what you think about that. You've been around men in those situations for a very long time.

And I'll say again, I mean you're right, and it's whether it's in the officer's mess or the privates mess or the office Christmas party. That kind of stuff. But I know there was a lot of drinking that went on. Honestly, I never felt threatened, and none of they. And so you'd be in a mess I'm thinking up in the Gold Line Heights, for example. There's maybe 40 or 50, and there's two girls, three girls, three women up there. And I didn't see it. I saw them getting drinking too much, perhaps, and then out came the arguments over the Maple Leafs versus the Canadians and singing the regimental songs.

And somebody got—you know when the karaoke machines came out, it was bad news. But if you're on a military base, there's still regulations right? The mess closes, everybody goes back, and you're sleeping in your quarters. Honestly, I saw more sort of fist fights break out than I saw kind of a sexual anything with a sexual overtone. And things have changed since then as well, by the way. I mean, you know, all our missions now are essentially—you don't drink. They're dry missions.

All Afghanistan was all dry, except when you got off the island, off the mission, and went into Kuwait or wherever. Ships are all dry now, right? I mean when they're at Sea. So when they pull up into Shore, then you have parties, and you have so on and so forth. So that's been rectified. Things have changed a lot. I mean when I was commanding officer from, you know, '89 to '91, already started some young officers saying well no, I don't want to go to happy hour. In my day, you know when I was a young officer, it was, you know, on Friday nights you go to happy hour. Here's a beer, here's a cigarette, you're going to smoke, you're going to drink.

And that's—I'm exaggerating obviously. But by the time, you know, so early 90s then, you know, young men and women were becoming more fit. I said no, you know, glass of orange juice and that'll be just great. And they, you know, it's 6 o'clock I'm going home, that's it. You know, in the old days we'd party till 11:00 every Friday night. So there's the evolution of—I say generational evolution of these aspects of, let's call it the organizational culture. Because I know you want to talk about culture to some degree. They've evolved, and they've evolved as much because of the participants in the culture as they have from organizational dictum.

You know, there's been a sense of okay, we need to modernize this. But a lot of people are finding other outlets for that—letting off steam as you characterized it. A lot of it is there, there's a lot of Fitness. It's different, it's different as it is in society, it's different. But that doesn't mean it still doesn't happen. It doesn't mean that people are still not going to get drunk and do stupid things. Yeah, but there's a difference between getting drunk and doing stupid things and getting drunk and doing nasty, malicious things.

And that's where—this is it—it is hard. And in the premise of your question: how do you make that distinction? Well, you have to say—you have to establish expected Norms of behavior, and those evolve over time. What was acceptable 30, 20 years ago is not necessarily acceptable—not because it's politically correct, but just because we've changed.

So, you know, drinking—it's seed, I use that as an example. I was the one, in fact, that banned drinking at sea for a variety of reasons, including—and the way you characterized your previous research experience was like deja vu. It was the senior non-commissioned members of the Navy at a particular board meeting who said to me, "Admiral, we're telling you 99% of our problems are alcohol related." All this misconduct, you can bend it all into—if they weren't drunk at the time, the chances of them having done whatever it was was pretty slim to none.

So there's—there go my people, I am their leader, so I must follow them. This is what you were getting this from—the troops. They were telling you, the senior leadership, the senior non-commissioned members telling me we have a problem and we need you Admirals wearing your big pants to do something about it. So we said okay. Let's look at this, let's study it to the best we can in the context of our own little ecosystem, and let's come up with some Progressive approaches that didn't ban it entirely because that would be punitive, reasonable and just silly. And that doesn't just accept the status quo but says okay, you know what? Drinking at sea is dangerous, first of all, because you're operating in extreme—ahem, it would be—I use your oil rig analogy. They don't allow them to drink on an oil rig for very good reasons, so they can keep their hands, right? Or not kill somebody accidentally because they're drunk.

So let's—how about that as a thought process? And yes, that evolved over time. But I think we also have to remember that the military, the armed forces more generally, are conservative. So for change to happen, they used to say—what was it—the only thing harder than getting a new idea in the military mind is taking out an old idea. But it’s true, it changes slowly. But the Navy, hundreds of years tradition, not impeded by progress. Exactly. Kind of right? Jokes—they're jokes but come from somewhere. They come from somewhere.

And in fact, so you have to—but you know, you look at this evolution of alcohol and all that, and it's—and so is there a big culture change required? I'm with Barbara, I think no. I think, you know, you need to make sure that people understand that that you have to respect others and in all kind of ways and everything. And you root out those Predators. But, and you're not alone. That was the big thing—that's the hardest thing for me when I see on TV when something happened, a victim says this happened to me and there was nowhere to turn to.

And I have a real hard time with that because the military—okay, it's huge, it's a family. You've met people throughout your whole career. Even if you've been in two or three years, you've got people you were on this course with or trained with. And so your chain of command is not welcoming to your—a failure in leadership? That, Barb, to your point when you see these things, they are fundamentally failures in leadership.

Well, I'm curious too though—well, are they fa…? So, you pointed out very early on that you hadn't experienced the sorts of things. Okay, but I'm wondering too—there's a cultural element to that, a sociological element, let's say. But there's also a personal element. Like, I'll give you an example of this: Daughters of Alcoholics are more statistically likely to marry alcoholics.

Now, we don't know why that is. We don't know if they find men who are drinking and because they're accustomed to that, they pick those men. Or we don't know if they covertly reinforce their husbands for drinking to the point where they become alcoholic. But it's such a widespread phenomenon that if you're doing genetic analysis of the transmission of alcoholism, you have to take into account this issue of assortative mating, it's called. Okay, so now the issue is: was there a manner in which you conducted yourself personally that made you less likely to be the target of such unwanted attention that might have to do with alcohol consumption?

And then also, is it reasonable to assume that your experience is emblematic of the experience of females in the military? Or were you, for whatever reason, protected personally, or more fortunate? So, first of all, women that join the military, I think tend to be—well certainly in my time, they tended to be—like, not everybody's going to want to join the military. So I think that maybe they're a little bit more outspoken.

I don't know. I would say that like it didn't happen to me, but I didn't see it happening around me. And I was close to a lot of women in the military, and nobody— you were there early, yeah. And, but nobody came—like even at the end of my career when I was in NDHQ—and you know, like nobody would—I didn't hear about people saying this happened to me, you know, what are we going to do about it? I think that the majority of women, it didn't happen to, and I think that the ones that did, yes, absolutely, they should seek justice.

But I also think that to say there was nowhere to go, I mean, you had your peers, you had your—the Padres—we have Padres that doors open all the time. You had a medical staff, you had somebody that you worked with on a course, you had—it was so many avenues. And the physical training guys and girls—there were so many places that you could go for help. I find it astonishing when I hear "this happened to me" and "it happened to me over and I had nowhere to turn to." That I really have a hard time with that. I really do.

So now, when you entered the military, what response did you get from the men? Well, okay, so we don't—and we put—okay, so nowadays you wouldn't have like our lockers in the military police. Like it wasn't a changing locker, but we kept our gun in there and you know our ticket books and all that sort of stuff. So you were never there undressed, but we were all together, men and women, and there wasn't one locker that didn't have Miss January or whatever, you know, in the thing.

So nowadays that's just not cool. And so I responded to that by going, getting, remember Bert Reynolds in Cosmopolitan? And I put him up in my locker, and we never had a problem with that again. You know, like it just—you know, the guys said, "I'm not looking at that every day." So well, and then that was it. And then—and it took a while, but I think that I didn't—I don't think it was hostile.

I think it was more—they didn't know how to act. I had a flat tire once in my police in Edmonton. You know how cold it is there? I had a flat tire—nope, I know how to change tire. So I'm changing the tire, and I do see another military police car go by—fine, change the tire. I come in, the usual ribbing, you know, just like the guys would get. But this one military police corporal, he’s waiting. He's waiting at the end, and he says, "Barb, he said, listen, I drove past you today." I said yeah, I saw you. And he said, "I didn't know what to do."

Right? Right? He said, "If it had been Mike, I would have stopped to help, but I thought you were going to say, I—do you think I can't do this? I didn't—I didn't know what to do." And I said, "Next time, stop the f-ing car" kind of thing. And we were cool after that, right? But that was the kind of things that I was—they didn't really know what to do. They didn't really know how to deal with it. And this idea that we're men and women are interchangeable, I have a hard time with that too.

Okay, so I want to really have a hard time with that. So let's talk—let's talk a little bit about that. So I might as well get myself in trouble right off the bat. [Music]