Reflecting on Operation HONOUR: Race and Sexual Misconduct in the CAF
By Anna McAlpine, Queen’s University
As many are aware, the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) are having a moment of reckoning in the midst of what is arguably the largest sexual misconduct scandal the organization has ever faced. Following allegations of sexual misconduct against former Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Johnathan Vance, his successor Admiral Art McDonald stepped down after he learned he was also under investigation for sexual misconduct. On March 31, 2021, then Chief of Personnel, Vice-Admiral Haydn Edmundson was placed on indefinite leave following allegations of sexual assault. As such, the CAF is presently in the process of reckoning with what is clearly a broken system for handling sexual misconduct in its ranks. Acting CDS Lieutenant-General Wayne Eyre formally ended Operation HONOUR, the program created during Vance’s tenure to stamp out sexual misconduct in the CAF, in March in favour of the creation of new policy. As the CAF works towards developing a new program to address sexual misconduct, it is crucial that they are reflexive about the failures of Operation HONOUR.
While the CAF works towards new policy, the organization needs to be attentive to personnel’s specific experiences of sexual misconduct and to take intersectional identities into account. Thus far, no substantive attention has been paid to racialized groups that experience high rates of sexual misconduct in the CAF, particularly Indigenous servicemembers who are three times more likely than their non-Indigenous counterparts to be sexually assaulted in the Primary Reserve and twice as likely to be sexually assaulted in the Regular Force. The erasure of racialized servicemembers from the conversations about sexual misconduct is consistent with a culture of white supremacy and a belief that social justice will simply “trickle down” from white women to women of colour. Racialized and Indigenous women experience oppression differently on the basis of their intersecting identities and therefore, specific actions, conversation, and policy are required to address their experiences of sexual misconduct. In order for the next iteration of CAF sexual misconduct policy to be effective in addressing the issue of sexual misconduct for all servicemembers, the specific experiences of racialized servicemembers must be taken into account. If the unique experiences of a diversity of servicemembers are not taken into account in the design of the new sexual misconduct policy, the policy will not work for everyone.
Through intersectional analysis of the Operation HONOUR manual, I found that there was no attention paid to race or how it intersects with gender to create a culture of sexual misconduct. Race was hardly ever mentioned in Operation HONOUR and racist slurs, jokes, and other racist behaviour were not included in the Spectrum of Sexual Misconduct provided in the manual. This is despite the fact that these behaviours also contribute to a toxic environment that is tolerant of harassment and assault.
Many would contend that racist behaviour was excluded from Operation HONOUR because it is covered in Canadian Army Order 11–82 Hateful Conduct. However, the separation of hateful conduct from sexual misconduct demonstrates the failure of the CAF to acknowledge the connections between multiple forms of oppression. As such, the Spectrum of Hateful Conduct that appears in Order 11–82 makes no connections between sexual misconduct and hateful conduct. Attempts to separate sexual misconduct from hateful conduct creates policy that erases the experiences of racialized women. Does an Indigenous woman who was called a slur that is both racist and sexualized report the incident as hateful conduct or sexual misconduct? The failure of the CAF to design policy that would be able to respond to such a situation demonstrates that the organization’s sexual misconduct policy is simply not designed to meet the needs of racialized women; they were not considered.
To rectify the failures of the above graphics, I designed the figure below based on Lydia Guy’s 2006 continuum of sexual violence. The white circles depict sources of oppression and the dark blue circles depict the behaviours that they can lead to, sexual and otherwise. The randomized ordering of the dark blue circles is intended to demonstrate that violence does not always progress in a linear fashion, nor is one experience necessarily ‘worse’ than another.
I strongly recommend that in its next iteration of sexual misconduct policy, the CAF makes connections between multiple forms of oppression and sexual misconduct clear and writes them into policy documents and educational materials. Following the implementation of Operation HONOUR, sexual misconduct targeting Indigenous servicewomen went up, not down and it will not go down until the CAF makes the connections between racism and sexual misconduct clear. The CAF must commit to changing a culture of white supremacy as well as a culture of misogyny.
Author Bio:
Anna McAlpine is in the final year of her undergraduate degree at Queen’s University, majoring in Global Development Studies. She is a Research Assistant at the Centre for International and Defence Policy in the Gender Lab. Anna wrote this article based on her undergraduate thesis work, which was conducted with a Young MINDS Targeted Engagement Grant (TEG) from the Department of National Defence.
