Description
Following increased judicial and parliamentary scrutiny and several high-profile scandals, the British military has recently introduced a zero-tolerance policy towards ‘unacceptable sexual behaviour’ as part of its broader strategy of ‘tackling sexual offending’. These policy initiatives are framed around an understanding of sexual violence as something that can be addressed and eradicated from the institution. Despite the pervasiveness of sexual offending within the military, this framing positions these violences not as a systematic issue, but rather as a product of a few ‘bad apples’ that can be identified and rooted out in ways that preserves an imagination of the armed forces as both good and unique. Drawing on observations from the court martial trial and the sentencing hearing of a soldier who raped and sexually assaulted his colleague, in this paper I explore how a guilty verdict can trouble and unsettle these ideas of military exceptionalism. Specifically, I ask how disruptive narratives about the more insidious aspects of military culture (such as excessive alcohol consumption, ‘lad culture’, and rumour mills) are navigated within the courtroom and how the figure of the ‘good soldier’ is rehabilitated in relation to these.
