Rape in the Canadian Forces: 'so much secrecy'

Late soldier's letters tell of rapes at camp

National Post: Capt. Nichola Goddard, who in 2006 became the first female Canadian combat death, wrote to her husband that women working at bases in Afghanistan were often victims of sexual harassment or assault, and that in one week there had been six rapes at her camp.

'OK. Now for all the stuff I can't say over the phone,' she wrote in a personal letter to her husband of three years, Jason Beam, on Feb. 3, 2006, a little more than three months before she was killed in a firefight with the Taliban, west of Kandahar. 'There were six rapes in the camp last week, so we have to work out an escort at night.'...

Capt. Goddard's letters are the basis of Calgary Herald columnist Valerie Fortney's new book, Sunray: The Death and Life of Captain Nichola Goddard. 'Her husband was the only person she wrote about that to,' Ms. Fortney said in an interview... 'There's so much secrecy. I wanted to go farther into that, but I came upon brick walls every time I asked other soldiers and officers about assault or harassment. It's a big no-go zone. No one would even talk off the record about it.'...

While Capt. Goddard's words don't indicate that she ever felt physically threatened by her fellow soldiers, she did tell her husband that she suffered sexual harassment in the form of constant rumours that she was sleeping with men on the base...

Karen Davis, a retired lieutenant-commander and current defence scientist at the Canadian Forces Leadership Institute, conducted in-depth research in the late 1990s, looking at why certain women who served in the combat arms chose to leave. 'Their experiences were ... similar in terms of what [Goddard] made reference to -- being ogled, and comments implying that sooner or later they'd have to provide sex to their peers... They described a highly sexualized environment and, in some cases, assault or rape.'...

'Certainly, we know from the research I did in the '90s that there was a pretty difficult environment for women. And it would be naive to believe that all of a sudden things have just miraculously gone away in the last eight to 10 years.'

Image: Capt. Nichola Goddard; source here.