Host Julianne Hazlewood of “Ontario Morning”
Host Julianne Hazlewood on the program, CBC Radio One Ontario Morning, called to talk about my reaction to the Statistics Canada report released on October 8, 2020: Experiences of unwanted sexualized and discriminatory behaviours and sexual assault among students at Canadian Military Colleges 2019.
Our discussion takes place at 28:33mins on the copied link. If you’d like to listen to a recording of the interview, you can connect to the program by clicking on the title for this journal post and you will be redirected to CBC Radio One Ontario Morning for October 15, 2020.
Also, I’ve included a cut and paste copy of the link, if you prefer to access the Ontario One interview this way: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-112-ontario-morning-from-cbc-radio/clip/15803260-ontario-morning-thursday-october-15-2020- and here is a cut and paste copy of the link to the Statistics Canada Report: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/pub/85-002-x/2020001/article/00011-eng.pdf?st=b9sWsLN4
The transcript of our conversation is posted as follows:
CBC Radio One Ontario Morning
Interview with Julianne Hazlewood
The following is a slightly cleaned up transcript of our discussion which aired on Thursday, October 15th, 2020 at 7:40 a.m. EST time. (YES! That is correct. I was live on CBC Radio at 4:40 a.m. PST). The interview start time is 0:28:33hr on the recording timeline bar.
Julianne: A new Statistics Canada Report is painting a bleak picture of widespread sexual misconduct in Canadian Military Colleges. The report surveyed 512 Officer Cadets at Kingston’s Royal Military College and its French counterpart in Quebec. It found that 68% of students said they witnessed or experienced unwanted sexualized behaviour. Kate Armstrong was RMC’s first female military cadet. She’s also the author of The Stone Frigate a book about her experience in the military college. Good morning.
Kate: Good morning, Julianne. How are you?
Julianne: I’m great. Thank you so much for speaking with us. Besides the report finding that almost 70% of military college students said they had seen or experience unwanted sexual behaviour, 28% of women said they had been sexually assaulted during their time at the military colleges, that’s nearly twice the rate amongst students at postsecondary institutions. What does that tell you? What do you make of that?
Kate: This is an extremely complex issue. When I first heard the news, I was astounded just in general with the percentages that were being reported. They were so high and it really surprised me and saddened me to think of all those cadets experiencing sexual misconduct and sexual assault. I couldn’t figure out how this was possible when the military was openly saying that it’s committed to zero tolerance and has taken steps to institute and improve policies for, you know, reporting and prevention. I was so proud of the cadet who had come forward and had the courage to report because they did so from within the system and that’s really brave.
Over the weekend, I read the entire Stats Canada report and I was even more shocked to discover that, overall, besides the statistic that you just gave, RMC findings were similar to what was observed in the general postsecondary populations across Canada in the civilian institutions. I was left wondering what is really happening with all of our young university aged people in the 18-24 range. It felt like a national crisis. And when you pinpoint the percentage of sexual assault, sexual assault is a crime and it needs to be dealt with, like, treated accordingly within the criminal justice system. And then there’s the whole grey area of sexual misconduct. I don’t know how you want to delineate that but it’s such a complex issue.
Julianne: Yeah. So, reading the report, it raised concerns, serious concerns for you, it raised questions. You wrote a book, as I mentioned, about being in the Royal Military College, about being its first female in its first female cohort. How would you describe your experience at RMC?
Kate: When I was young, I did experience, at the military college, I did experience sexual misconduct as its laid out in the report. There were the jokes, there was inappropriate touching, there was stalking. Those behaviours existed. One thing that I’ve really been thinking about lately though is that fact that when I was young, no one was asking me if I was experiencing sexual misconduct. In fact, when I asked for help, I was advised to keep it to myself. And as far as I know, this survey is the first of its kind in the general population, besides military college, but also all postsecondary institutions. And, so, this may sound strange but I’ve started to wonder if perhaps there is a shift of the dial that the numbers that are being reported are reality and the difference is that young people know now what’s right and wrong and they also have mechanisms to report. And I am in no way discounting that the behaviours are inappropriate, at best, and at worst they’re criminal. From the big picture of what is really going on, maybe it’s a good thing that we have the questions being asked and that people are coming forward and actually delineating ‘yes, this is an inappropriate behaviour that happened to me’.
Julianne: Right. And there is a system in place, and as you said, when you brought your concerns, or what happened to you, forward they were disregarded. What was the impact of that on you?
Kate: Um. Really devastating. Royal Military College is difficult. It’s difficult to get in and it’s difficult to graduate. Pretty much the whole time you’re there, you’re in survival mode. There’s a difference as well, between Royal Military College—when I say that I mean both the Colleges—and the civilian university experience, or postsecondary experience, in that you live in the world. There’s no, um, ‘end of day, you go home to your apartment’. Everything is there. You’re in the dorms, you’re always together.
Julianne: In the bubble.
Kate: You eat together, you live together. If something happens to you, then you have to eat dinner with that person, you have to be around that person. When I spoke earlier about, that sexual assault is a crime and that needs to be dealt with as a crime, but the sexual misconduct piece can have a grey area. I think there is a normal, sort of, sexual discovery that’s happening when you’re leaving home and you’re going to postsecondary and there can be a lot of really awkward miscommunications that happen, right, so of course, the intent of one person may not be received that way by the other person. But then there’s the difference of what I call the ‘psychological warfare’ which is using sexual misconduct with malice, as an intent, as a power-over intent to harm and demean its victims. And that is flat out wrong.
I’ve heard from people across the spectrum. It’s been forty years since I went to the College. I wrote my book because of my experience as a civilian as well in the corporate world afterward, to do with being a woman in a male-dominated career and that culturally it’s unnecessary to treat women as equals. But since my book came out, I’ve had a lot of mail from cadets, male and female cadets, who have written to me and said ‘things are different but they’re more underground’. So, it’s definitely not resolved.
Julianne: Yeah. So it’s almost happening in a more nuanced way which can be difficult to get to as well it sounds like. What would you like to see from RMC to combat the sexual misconduct that’s being reported, that this report shows?
Kate: I’ll speak to your first comment and then I’ll speak to the other piece. I have had cadets that are current students, this vintage of cadets, saying that they’ve read my book and they can’t believe how similar it is. My way of looking at it is; if the administration are the parents and then each year is a different level of sibling, the seniors sort of tell the juniors “this is how you should behave”. So, by the time they become seniors, they are telling their junior siblings who have come through the system ‘this is how to behave’. It’s bizarre to me, and some of the cadets that I’ve been speaking with, that some of the things in my book are exactly how they were when we were cadets because it’s systemic. If you think of it as ancestral family systemic stuff that gets passed through, then dealing with that the obvious most important goal, for me, is to stop the behaviours. Under any and all circumstances, sexual misconduct and sexual assault needs to stop.
That’s a process and I understand that behaviour change is very complex and challenging. To me, a critical step is to make it safe for the victims to come forward and get the help they need. And this has two purposes, it identifies also who the perpetrators are and also then, the perpetrators need help as well—they have issues going on given that they’re doing these behaviours—but most importantly is to make sure that the victims are being heard and that they are being told: I believe you, I’m sorry that happened to you, how can I help you?
And, I think, ultimately you cannot legislate a culture. It’s a living entity. Any culture is just simply the norms, like, the habits and attitudes of the people that are within the culture. RMC can draw on its greatest resource, the cadets themselves.
Julianne: Yes.
Kate: When I’m speaking to the cadets, they know what they want. It’s that whole thing too of wanting to survive and not push back against the policies, so maybe go to the cadets and ask them and harness their ideas. If this is happening systemically across our whole university band, it may simply be the reporting thing that no one has asked them before because I understand that the civilian university postsecondary it’s the first time they’ve done a survey of that nature. But in terms of shifting the dial, I think RMC is really in a place where they can and I think the cadets have ideas about what they would like to see in their culture.
Julianne: Yes. Going to them for their perspectives. Kate, I appreciate you sharing your story and your perspective this morning.
Kate: Oh, thank you very much for having me, Julianne.
Julianne: Kate Armstrong is the author of The Stone Frigate. She was the first female cadet at the Royal Military College. The Department of National Defence and Canadian Forces has issued a statement in response to the report. It says: “Our message to those who have experienced sexual misconduct is this: Sexual misconduct is not tolerated in the Canadian Armed Forces, we must and will do better to ensure that all instructors, staff, and officer cadets are aware of their responsibility to create a safe and accepting space for all those at Canadian Military Colleges.”