Question:
Why can sexual harassment and assault in the military be experienced differently from similar harms in other workplaces?
Answer:
While sexual harassment and assault can occur in any workplace, the military setting can make both the initial harm and its long-term effects more complex to experience, navigate, and recover from.
Sociologists often describe the military as a “total institution.” This means the institution can decide where members live, work, socialize, and receive health care. For many in the military, especially those under mandatory service obligations, resigning, changing jobs, or creating distance from the person who harmed them is not always possible.
The person responsible may remain in the same unit, chain of command, or professional community. Reporting what happened can therefore feel less like accessing help and more like risking one’s career, reputation, privacy, and personal safety.
These realities help explain why many do not report immediately, if at all. Military members may worry about being labelled a troublemaker, losing opportunities, being stigmatized, or having their credibility questioned by a system on which they remain dependent. When they see others met with disbelief, minimization, or inaction, silence can appear safer than speaking.
Many members are forced to keep functioning in the same workplace even after it no longer feels safe. To survive, some compartmentalize or dissociate from the original harm, contributing to chronic stress. Trauma processing may be delayed for years, even decades, before they feel safe enough to acknowledge and name the harms done to them.
Institutional Injury and Betrayal
Researchers increasingly recognize the institution itself as a source of injury, not only the setting in which injury occurs. In Mask: Living in the Fracture, Dr. John Whelan describes “institutional injury” as harm caused when institutions on which people depend fail in their duty of care through deficiencies in structures, policies, or processes. This injury can be compounded by delayed investigations, opaque complaint systems, administrative resistance, or repeated challenges to legitimate health impact claims.
Related, but distinct, is Dr. Jennifer J. Freyd’s concept of “institutional betrayal” — the broken trust experienced when an institution dismisses, minimizes, or retaliates after harm is disclosed. For many survivors, that betrayal can feel like a second trauma.
Together, these concepts help explain why, for some, the most enduring damage comes from what happened after they turned to the institution for help, not just from the original harm.
These harms also damage the institution itself. When trust weakens, morale, retention, recruitment, cohesion, and public credibility can all suffer.
Why Institutional Response Quality Matters
Research shows that health outcomes are influenced by how institutions respond to trauma disclosures. When people are believed, supported, and given meaningful choices, their likelihood of recovery and post-traumatic growth improves. When people encounter non-supportive institutional responses, trauma responses often deepen.
That is why education, leadership training, and policy reform are not optional. Major (Retired) Donna Van Leusden, formerly Riguidel, leads Survivor Perspectives, a training initiative designed to help military leaders and other professionals respond to trauma disclosures with greater competence and confidence. This work recognizes that response quality directly influences outcomes.
Preventing military sexual trauma requires more than addressing individual misconduct. It requires confronting the institutional conditions in which harm occurs and ensuring that institutional responses support recovery rather than compound injury. When the institution causes part of the damage, the solution must include institutional change.
Bill C-11, which modernizes aspects of Canada’s military justice system, includes proposed amendments that would give victims more choice in how certain offences proceed. That shift recognizes the importance of victim agency.
At the same time, major accountability commitments from the CAF-DND Sexual Misconduct Class Action Final Settlement Agreement remain unfinished. Schedule L’s External Review of Operation Honour and the Sexual Misconduct Response Centre is still outstanding, and the $2 million set aside for Additional Awareness and Culture Change remains unspent. Completing these commitments in a timely and meaningful way is essential if the CAF hopes to rebuild trust.
If the military can compel service and control access to career progression, justice, health care, and safety, it also carries a duty to respond when harm occurs. When that response is delayed, opaque, or unsupportive, the institution becomes part of the injury.
