‘Toxic’ army unit charged with investigating sex crimes allowing abusers to ‘get away with it’ in own ranks, whistleblower says
More than a dozen women came forward to report a staff sergeant in the Royal Military Police (RMP) for sexual abuse, but he was allowed to resign from the army instead of face charges.
Warning: This article contains material some readers may find distressing
That’s the claim of a whistleblower who served as a sergeant in the RMP for over a decade and says she was one of the man’s victims.
Amy, not her real name, says a “toxic” culture in the military police means sexual predators in the army are “getting away with stuff that they shouldn’t be getting away with”.
It’s a rare insight into life inside the Royal Military Police, the corps charged with investigating crime in the army.
Amy described how the man who assaulted her would go into women’s rooms and sit on their beds. She says he used to force her to go out driving with him at night and talk about sex.
“He preyed on the young, new females that were in the unit,” she says.
“One day, I was out with my friends in town and he was on patrol… There were two of us that went over to speak to him and I had quite a low-cut top on.
“So he hooked his finger around my top and pulled my boob out”.
She recalls as she tried to stop him, “he grabbed my hand and put it on his penis”.
She claims there are other men in the RMP who’ve been accused of sexual offences, recalling hearing of five separate allegations of rape against male colleagues by female colleagues.
“If all of this sexual assault and bullying and rapes are going on within the military police, how can they then go out and investigate the wider army for doing the same things?” she says.
“It doesn’t work.”
Amy, a former RMP officer who alleges sexual abuse in the armed forces
‘He got away with it’
Looking back on her career in the army is difficult for Amy.
After leaving, she tried to settle back into life as a civilian with a new job and a young family to look after, but says she worried about bumping into former colleagues in the street.
“It’s taken me a long time to heal,” she says.
“I was very bitter towards my military career when I left, but I’ve had to sort of learn, build myself up again and remember the good times because they were really good times as well… I think it was just so bad at points.”
When she joined the RMP, she believed she would be part of a unit “representing how the rest of the soldiers should be conducting themselves”.
The reality, she says, was that she had become part of “one of the most toxic” corps in the army.
She recalls being told that the staff sergeant she had reported for sexual assault would be allowed to resign.
“They basically told me he’s not going to be charged, but will be leaving the military… doing him a favour,” she says.
“He got away with it all,” she adds. “He’s not going to lose his pension and whatever else he would have lost with a dishonourable discharge.
“He’s left without a criminal record… that’s not safe for civilians as well, because it’s not even on his record.”
‘They investigate themselves’
Earlier this year, an inquest into the suicide of 19-year-old Royal Artillery Gunner Jaysley Beck found she had been failed by the army after reporting sexual assault and harassment.
Since then, Sky News has reported claims of widespread abuse and growing calls for investigations into sexual offences to be removed from the RMP and instead carried out by civilian police.
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From March: Army women reveal alleged abuse
The Labour chair of the influential House of Commons Defence Committee is now urging the government to act.
Tan Dhesi told Sky News: “The system needs to change… incidents of sexual violence and sexual assault should be dealt with not by the Royal Military Police but by civilian police and civilian courts.
“I hope that the government will be making that substantial change in the very, very near future; in fact, they should do it ASAP.”
Tan Dhesi MP told Sky News that ‘the system needs to change… ASAP’
Since Gunner Beck’s death, a new tri-service complaints team has been announced by the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
The change will see bullying, harassment, discrimination related service complaints dealt with by a team outside the commands of the Royal Navy, British Army and Royal Air Force.
However, Amy believes investigations need to be done “completely separately from the military”.
“Otherwise it doesn’t work because friends will be investigating friends,” she says.
“I think there’s such a male-dominated space in the military still. Women have no chance… and it’s not fair because people are getting away with stuff that they shouldn’t be getting away with and allowed to continue doing it and ruining lives.”
She believes the entire system lacks accountability. “They investigate themselves,” she says, even down to how the RMP is regulated.
“The people that run that unit are RMP. They get posted in, do a few years and then get posted back out.”
‘I was told off for reporting it’
Katie, also not her real name, served in the army for over 20 years. She saw active service in Afghanistan and rose to the rank of Captain.
It was a distinguished career that was brought to a premature end by sexual abuse and whistleblowing.
Having taken the difficult decision to leave the army she now leads a secluded life and suffers poor mental health.
Katie (centre), who resigned from the armed forces after alleged sexual abuse, as a serving RMP officer
“I still struggle,” she says. “I’m still very wary of men. My relationship is strained.
“Everything seems like black and white now, like I live my life in black and white rather than full colour… As a person, it has changed my life forever.”
To begin with, she was in the same unit that Gunner Beck would join years later. She too experienced harassment and abuse, and says her line manager “laughed” when she reported it.
“I just felt like dehumanised, I felt like property, I didn’t feel like a person anymore,” she says.
“And so I would avoid people… I would hide in the garages, behind the tanks, in between the guns, just praying that these people hadn’t seen me and I might be able to escape them for that day.”
She moved to a different unit but says wherever she went, abuse was rife. After being groped by a higher-ranking colleague, she assumed her chain of command would escalate her report to the RMP.
Instead, she says she was “put in front of the Sergeant Major and told off”.
“I remember at the time saying I’d like to call the civilian police, and I was told that I wasn’t allowed to do that and I’d be disciplined if I tried to do that,” she said. “So I was so frightened.”
She stayed in the army, hoping to make a difference. As an officer, she began reporting abusers on behalf of younger victims.
“I kept this goal in my head of reaching a position one day where I could help other women,” she said. “When I got there, I realised that it was way more toxic than I could have ever imagined.
“The officer corps were actually the worst perpetrators of all because they brushed it under the carpet. There was a will and a need more to protect themselves or their friends. Or the reputation of the unit first and foremost.”
She believes changes made by the MoD since the death of Gunner Beck to remove the chain of command from sexual abuse investigations will make “little difference”, saying they’ll still be carried out by “the same people, but just under a new title”.
‘They should be held accountable’
An MoD spokesperson told Sky News that “unacceptable and criminal behaviour has absolutely no place in our Armed Forces”.
They added: “That is why this government is creating a new Tri-Service Complaints team to take the most serious complaints out of the chain of single service command for the first time, and has launched a new central taskforce on Violence Against Women and Girls to give this issue the attention it deserves.
“We are also establishing an independent Armed Forces Commissioner with the power to visit defence sites unannounced, and to investigate and report to parliament any welfare matters affecting service life.”
Amy believes the RMP is not fit for purpose.
“They have higher standards to uphold, yet they don’t uphold them within their own regiment, within their own lives, and then they’re expected to police and uphold those standards throughout the rest of the army,” she says.
“At the end of the day, they know the law and they should be held accountable for what they do.”
Anyone feeling emotionally distressed or suicidal can call Samaritans for help on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org in the UK. In the US, call the Samaritans branch in your area or 1 (800) 273-TALK
The UK-US trade deal has been signed and is “done”, US President Donald Trump has said as he met Sir Keir Starmer at the G7 summit.
The US president told reporters in Canada: “We signed it, and it’s done. It’s a fair deal for both. It’ll produce a lot of jobs, a lot of income.”
Sir Keir said the document “implements” the deal to cut tariffs on cars and aerospace, describing it as a “really important agreement”.
“So this is a very good day for both of our countries – a real sign of strength,” the prime minister added.
Mr Trump added that the UK was “very well protected” against any future tariffs, saying: “You know why? Because I like them”.
However, he did not say whether levies on British steel exports to the US would be set to 0%, saying “we’re gonna let you have that information in a little while”.
Mr Trump also praised Sir Keir as a “great” prime minister, adding: “We’ve been talking about this deal for six years, and he’s done what they haven’t been able to do.”
He added: “We’re very longtime partners and allies and friends and we’ve become friends in a short period of time.
“He’s slightly more liberal than me to put it mildly… but we get along.”
Sir Keir added that “we make it work”.
As the pair exited a mountain lodge in the Canadian Rockies where the summit is being held, Mr Trump held up a physical copy of the trade agreement to show reporters.
Several leaves of paper fell from the binding, and Sir Keir quickly stooped to pick them up, saying: “A very important document.”
Sir Keir Starmer picks up paper from the UK-US trade deal after Donald Trump dropped it at the G7 summit. Pic: Reuters
The US president also appeared to mistakenly refer to a “trade agreement with the European Union” at one point as he stood alongside the British prime minister.
Mr Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on countries in April. At the time, he announced 10% “reciprocal” rates on all UK exports – as well as separately announced 25% levies on cars and steel.
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In a joint televised phone call in May, Sir Keir and Mr Trump announced the UK and US had agreed on a trade deal – but added the details were being finalised.
Ahead of the G7 summit, the prime minister said he would meet Mr Trump for “one-on-one” talks, and added the agreement “really matters for the vital sectors that are safeguarded under our deal, and we’ve got to implement that”.
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
Politics latest: Grooming gangs findings unveiled
The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
Read more on grooming gangs:
What we do and don’t know from the data
A timeline of the scandal
Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
Flawed data has been used repeatedly to dismiss claims about “Asian grooming gangs”, Baroness Louise Casey has said in a new report, as she called for a new national inquiry.
The government has accepted her recommendations to introduce compulsory collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in grooming cases, and for a review of police records to launch new criminal investigations into historic child sexual exploitation cases.
Politics latest: Yvette Cooper reveals details of grooming gangs report
Baroness Louise Casey carried out the review. Pic: PA
The crossbench peer has produced an audit of sexual abuse carried out by grooming gangs in England and Wales, after she was asked by the prime minister to review new and existing data, including the ethnicity and demographics of these gangs.
In her report, she has warned authorities that children need to be seen “as children” and called for a tightening of the laws around the age of consent so that any penetrative sexual activity with a child under 16 is classified as rape. This is “to reduce uncertainty which adults can exploit to avoid or reduce the punishments that should be imposed for their crimes”, she added.
Baroness Casey said: “Despite the age of consent being 16, we have found too many examples of child sexual exploitation criminal cases being dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges where a 13 to 15-year-old had been ‘in love with’ or ‘had consented to’ sex with the perpetrator.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The peer has called for a nationwide probe into the exploitation of children by gangs of men.
She has not recommended another over-arching inquiry of the kind conducted by Professor Alexis Jay, and suggests the national probe should be time-limited.
The national inquiry will direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the inquiry’s “purpose is to challenge what the audit describes as continued denial, resistance and legal wrangling among local agencies”.
On the issue of ethnicity, Baroness Casey said police data was not sufficient to draw conclusions as it had been “shied away from”, and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators.
‘Flawed data’
However, having examined local data in three police force areas, she found “disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as in the significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity identified in local reviews and high-profile child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country, to at least warrant further examination”.
She added: “Despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about men from Asian or Pakistani backgrounds grooming and sexually exploiting young white girls, the system has consistently failed to fully acknowledge this or collect accurate data so it can be examined effectively.
“Instead, flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue.
“This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities and plays into the hands of those who want to exploit it to sow division.”
Read more:
Officials tried to cover up grooming scandal, says Cummings
Why many victims welcome national inquiry into grooming gangs
Grooming gangs scandal timeline
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From January: Grooming gangs: What happened?
The baroness hit out at the failure of policing data and intelligence for having multiple systems which do not communicate with each other.
She also criticised “an ambivalent attitude to adolescent girls both in society and in the culture of many organisations”, too often judging them as adults.
‘Deep-rooted failure’
Responding to Baroness Casey’s review, Ms Yvette Cooper told the House of Commons: “The findings of her audit are damning.
“At its heart, she identifies a deep-rooted failure to treat children as children. A continued failure to protect children and teenage girls from rape, from exploitation, and serious violence.
She added: “Baroness Casey found ‘blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions’ all played a part in this collective failure.”
Ms Cooper said she will take immediate action on all 12 recommendations from the report, adding: “We cannot afford more wasted years repeating the same mistakes or shouting at each other across this House rather than delivering real change.”
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper responded to the report. Pic: PA
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said: “After months of pressure, the prime minister has finally accepted our calls for a full statutory national inquiry into the grooming gangs.
“We must remember that this is not a victory for politicians, especially the ones like the home secretary, who had to be dragged to this position, or the prime minister. This is a victory for the survivors who have been calling for this for years.”
Ms Badenoch added: “The prime minister’s handling of this scandal is an extraordinary failure of leadership. His judgement has once again been found wanting.
“Since he became prime minister, he and the home secretary dismissed calls for an inquiry because they did not want to cause a stir.
“They accused those of us demanding justice for the victims of this scandal as, and I quote, ‘jumping on a far right bandwagon’, a claim the prime minister’s official spokesman restated this weekend – shameful.”
The government has promised new laws to protect children and support victims so they “stop being blamed for the crimes committed against them”.
It is also launching new police operations and a new national inquiry to direct local investigations and hold institutions to account for past failures.
There will also be new ethnicity data and research “so we face up to the facts on exploitation and abuse,” the home secretary said.
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