And that’s just those who came forward.
Well, here’s something that might come as a surprise to some people, but it doesn’t come as a surprise to me.
There were about 19,000 claims submitted for compensation.
If 40% of claimants were men that’s 7,600 men. And trust me men, especially in a military environment, are NOT going to be all that willing to come forward out of fear that others will judge them as being weak or of being a homosexual.
https://aasas.ca/support-and-information/men-and-sexual-assault/
And if one sexual abuser in the Canadian Armed Forces had five or six victims that 7,600 sexually abused men could quickly become 45,600 men. And I don’t really want to think about the total number of men that were sexually abused by other men in the Canadian Armed Forces. According to some stats, over 90% of sexual assault victims never report their assaults.
I’ve known about this since 2014 when L’Actualite ran an exposé on sexual assault within the Canadian Armed Forces. Part of this exposé looked at male-on-male sexual assault within the Canadian Armed Forces. This exposé was stripped from the English version of this article that ran in Maclean’s magazine.
Basically, it was found that male-on-male sexual abuse in the Canadian Armed Forces had nothing to do with “homosexual” relationships. The article found that male-on-male sexual abuse was more about exerting dominance and punishing others for perceived bad behaviour.
https://globalnews.ca/news/8360601/canadian-veteran-military-sexual-assaults-misconduct/
https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2021/04/24/i-was-going-to-get-raped-former-soldier-speaks-out-about-his-being-sexually-assaulted-in-canadas-military.html
Male-on-male sexual abuse was frequently used to shame other members into compliance or to humiliate members that had “caused trouble” or used to blackmail a member into silence least his coworkers, friends, and family discover that he had participated in anal intercourse.
And I have absolutely no doubt that many male children living on the bases were subjected to this “discipline” in the household.
If a member of the Canadian Armed Forces is willing to force anal intercourse on a fellow adult member or if a member of the Canadian Forces is willing to force another adult member to perform fellatio on him in order to teach the other member a lesson or to change the other member’s non-conforming behaviour, you can bet that this type of behaviour found its way back into the PMQs on base.
Here’s a story from the New York Times that deals with male-on-male sexual abuse in the US mIlitary. There are numerous similarities between the US Military and the Canadian Forces.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/10/us/men-military-sexual-assault.html
Almost every type of discipline these men were taught would find its way back into the homes on base.
Once you engage in the military life, it’s almost impossible to separate and segregate the military life, the military training, and the military discipline from the home life.
I have absolutely no doubt that there are many a male military dependent that have some rather fucked up hazy memories from way back then. After all, it’s not like these male members were engaging in routine homosexual activities. They would just use male-on-male as a disciplinary tool.
It might have happened once.
It might have happened twice.
But I would be more than willing to believe that if it happened once or twice, that this would have been buried in the dark recesses of one’s mind.
Especially if it happened on a military base.
Who are you going to tell?
Who is going to believe you?
Are you really going to risk having your serving parent booted from the military?
Are you really going to endure the wrath of your serving parent if they found out that you tried to rat them out to the military police?
Sure does raise some interesting questions, doesn’t it?
Maybe this is one of the reason why the Canadian Armed Forces refuse to investigate historical child sexual abuse.
Maybe this is one of the reasons that some former serving parents are always telling their kids to forget about the past and to let sleeping dogs lie. Even if the serving parent in question didn’t abuse their own kids, were they aware of other service members that abused their own kids? Hard to keep secrets during an investigation, isn’t it?
Might be best to just deny anything and everything, right?
Child sexual abuse in the Canadian Forces 