Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment in Military Services: Culture,Hypermasculinity,and the Futility of Zero-Tolerance Approaches

Definitions

The articles presented in this volume use diverse terminology and definitions. To represent the variability of how the problem is understood across nations, we borrow from the definitions of sexual assault and harassment provided by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Technical Report on Sexual Violence in the Military (Dursun & Fossey, 2024, p. ES-1). They define sexual assault as “unwanted sexual contact and includes a broad range of behaviours, ranging from unwanted sexual touching to sexual violence” and sexual harassment as

behaviour of a sexual nature that is unwanted and has the purpose or effect of violating your dignity. Including, but not limited to any unwelcome sexual advance, unwanted sexual attention, requests for sexual favours, or verbal, online or physical acts or gestures of a sexual nature.

Although these definitions may not capture all uses of these concepts in this forum, they reflect perspectives drawn from an international panel whose countries share in the struggle to address sexual assault and harassment within their ranks and, as a result of such efforts, experience missteps in trying to eliminate them. We propose that one such common misstep is the adoption of zero-tolerance approaches.

Zero-Tolerance

The concept of zero-tolerance generally describes a range of severe and inflexible policies designed to eliminate unwanted or criminal behaviors (Stockdale et al., 2004). Those responsible for meting out consequences typically have little discretion, with punishment often issued without being tailored to the severity of the offense or with consideration of mitigating circumstances. Zero-tolerance became increasingly popular following Tailhook (Stockdale et al., 2004), the 1991 scandal in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps where approximately 83 women and seven men were assaulted, sexually and otherwise, by their fellow military officers at a symposium (Winerip, 2013). Like many deterrence-based approaches (e.g., mandatory minimum sentencing, three-strikes laws), zero-tolerance policies are popular because they are thought to protect against potential liability (Stockdale et al., 2004), and communicate a tough on crime approach that conveys an unwavering intolerance for misconduct in order to deter future assaults and harassment.

In her content analysis of zero-tolerance statements in the United States, Australian, and Canadian militaries over a 30-year period, MacKenzie (2023) found that zero-tolerance statements were usually used following high-profile cases of sexual assault and harassment. She found they were often employed as a rhetorical tool to convey the message that sexual assault and harassment are either no longer a problem or a problem that will be adequately addressed. She refers to these statements as rhetorical tools because they are promulgated without evidence to support the commitment to zero-tolerance. Furthermore, they are generally ineffective in deterring sexual assault and harassment as well as linked to problematic outcomes.

Hypermasculinity

Militaries around the world remain largely driven by masculine norms that stem from traditional views of male warriors (Enloe, 1988). These norms legitimate extreme or stereotypical expressions of masculinity (i.e., hypermasculinity), which include characteristics such as rationality, obedience, toughness, control, and discipline (Rosen et al., 2003). The assumption is that one must possess these traits to be a capable fighter (Breede & Davis, 2021) and that, through military service—particularly combat—these traits can be acquired and demonstrated (Eichler, 2014).

MacKenzie’s (2023) and Stockdale et al.’s (2004) descriptions of zero-tolerance statements conveying confidence, aggressiveness, and dominance mirror characteristics associated with hypermasculinity. Hence, we propose that zero-tolerance is attractive to military leaders because it not only conveys that the problem is being handled and minimizes liability for the organization, but it is also an approach that aligns with how militaries approach battles. That is, when leaders demand obedience and threaten severe punishment, they are demonstrating a hypermasculine approach to the issue. As representatives of an institution, they are demonstrating to their followers what they view to be strong leadership and how a (complex) problem should be solved. Unfortunately, these displays of hypermasculinity can exacerbate the problem.

Masse (2023) proposes that a characteristic of cultures driven by a warrior model is a strict divide between those who do not fit within the warrior ideal—the out-group—and those who do—the in-group. As she explains, “According to the model’s proponents, aggressiveness is key to operational effectiveness, and the inclusion of the out-group’s members—especially women—weakens the in-group’s cohesion” (p. 32). This conflation of operational effectiveness with hypermasculinity results in a devaluation of femininity and other expressions of masculinity, contributing to challenges with gender integration and high prevalence of sexual assault and harassment (Bonnes, 2024).

Although this discussion does not encompass the range of factors that contribute to sexual assault and harassment in militaries, it is clear that attempts to make quick work of ending sexual assault and harassment are misguided. Eschewing this approach, and as described below, the articles in this volume take multiple approaches to engage with the complexity of sexual assault and harassment in the military, including a focus on the broader issue of gender integration in military services.

This Special Forum

The articles in the volume collectively demonstrate that sexual assault and harassment is a complex process that spans from contexts that enable the behaviors through acts themselves through individual and institutional responses. The articles strive to attend to the full scope of these processes. They include studies of military culture that investigate how the culture espoused by institutions around sexual assault and harassment departs from the culture enacted by organizational actors (Lucas et al., 2026), address strategies to effectively change culture and increase the social inclusion of women (Spijkers et al., 2026), and consider factors that might exacerbate or mitigate consequences of culture change in military organizations (Wu et al., 2026). Studies of experiences of sexual misconduct in the volume include interviews of women with combat experience that address how sexual misconduct affects unit cohesion (Silins, 2026) and a study of same-sex sexual violence against men in military conflicts (Njoku et al., 2026). Articles in this volume that attend to responses to sexual assault and harassment include an experimental study on factors that influence bystander response (Rubenfeld et al., 2026), a study of how a military justice system attends to sexual violence, specifically how military lawyers construct victim legitimacy (Tosto & Bonnes, 2026), interviews with service members and veterans about organizational responses to sexual misconduct (Lade et al., 2026), and an examination of the extent to which civil–military relations, particularly its level of attention to gendered power relations, is a useful tool to understand sexual assault and harassment in militaries (Johnstone and Tait-Signal, 2023). We briefly summarize each below.

Lucas and colleagues (2026) focused on elements of military culture, particularly with respect to sexual misconduct, in interviews with active-duty service members. They investigated how service members perceived the culture espoused by their services and compared it to their perceptions of the culture actually enacted in the service. They found that service members were consistent in identifying an espoused culture that was intolerant of sexual misconduct and aspired toward reducing the number of such instances to zero. However, interviews showed an enacted culture that was tolerant of some forms of sexual misconduct, differences in conduct in private versus public settings, and widespread resentment of trainings in sexual misconduct. In other words, the enacted cultures of the services did not always align with the espoused culture.

Lucas et al.’s (2026) findings indicated that leadership espousing a culture is not sufficient to produce sought after cultural change. Similarly, Spijkers and colleagues (2026) found that elements of culture often have effects beyond those intended. They focused on strategies for increasing the social inclusion of women in armed services dominated by masculine norms. They noted that approaches to improve women’s social inclusion are limited in effectiveness without accompany efforts to improve cultures that denigrate women. Spijkers and colleagues worked with the Netherlands Armed Forces to carry out action research at nine sites to identify strategies most effective at increasing the social inclusion of women. A key finding of their research, as with other articles in this volume, was that elements of culture that existed for one purpose often had unintended negative consequences; for example, a culture aimed toward protecting women had the effect of placing women in the spotlight and hindering their activities in various ways. They did not find a golden bullet to resolve issues of women’s social inclusion in military services, but they did find elements that the most effective strategies will have in place.

Just as efforts to change cultures can have unintended consequences, elements of organizations can interfere with efforts to change culture. This is the focus of Wu et al.’s (2026) research. In a survey of military cadets, Wu and colleagues found that continued adherence to masculine norms had a negative relationship with openness to culture change, which included goals of advancing equity, eliminating sexual misconduct, and reducing power imbalances. The effect, however, was mediated by social dominance orientations. Specifically, conformity to masculine norms predicted preference for in-group dominance and out-group inequality, which predicted less acceptance of culture change. This finding is important in part because although conformity with masculine norms is associated with social dominance orientations, so too are other aspects of military culture such as tough mindedness, physical strength, and discipline. Clearly, there is no panacea that can be targeted toward creating a military force most receptive to culture change. Changing cultures is difficult, and any solution will require the slow process of reshaping expectations for what it means to be an effective service member.

Among articles in the volume addressing experiences of sexual assault and harassment, Silins (2026) examined organizational responses to sexual misconduct after it occurs. The study included interviews with service members who had experienced sexual misconduct during their time in service. Participants, who overwhelmingly described the misconduct as having been perpetrated by fellow service members, described feeling a sense of interpersonal betrayal at being harmed by someone on whom they depended and with whom they shared a common group membership. In addition, they described a sense of institutional betrayal based on the organizational response after they had experienced sexual misconduct. Several respondents described the institutional betrayal as being as damaging as the incident itself. Like the articles on culture discussed above, Silins found negative consequences resulting from a disconnect between formal organizational policies and procedures on one hand and the lived experiences of service members on the other. In this case, service members described being socialized to associate values such as respect and integrity with service, but their experiences with the institution did not reflect an enactment of these values.

A thread that runs through the articles in the volume discussed above is elements of broader organizational culture creating negative consequences in individuals’ daily experiences. This theme continues in the article by Njoku and colleagues (2026), who studied conflict-related same-sex sexual violence against men among Nigerian security agents. A key finding from their analyses was that operations associated with conflicts led to morally detrimental circumstances among service members, contributing to their likelihood of engaging in torture and sexual violence. Those activities, in turn, contributed to moral injuries, subsequently making such behaviors more likely in the future. This all contributes to a circle of violence created in part by putting soldiers in morally compromising situations. This article aligns with other articles in the volume in showing cascading consequences of broader cultural features that create intractable negative consequences for members of the organization. In this case, a precarious environment of moral ambiguity can create cycles of sexual violence and torture, the occurrences of which make future occurrences more likely.

Rubenfeld and colleagues (2026) investigated factors that might encourage or mitigate direct or indirect forms of bystander intervention in cases of sexual misconduct. Service members completed a survey-experiment that measured their likelihood of intervening in scenarios that varied by the relative rank of the perpetrator and the bystander, gender of the target, rank of the bystander, and severity of the situation. They found that those in subordinate positions were less likely than more senior members to indicate intent to directly intervene, but that this pattern was modulated in high severity situations. Furthermore, they found that indirect intervention was more likely to be used when the perpetrator was higher ranking than the bystander compared to situations where the perpetrator was of the same rank. Both direct and indirect intervention strategies are more like to be applied in high severity situations compared to low severity situations, and when the target is a woman compared to a man. Like other inquiries in this volume, the work of Rubenfeld and colleagues does not provide a panacea, in this case for ensuring that bystanders will intervene when a situation requires it. It does, however, identify broader factors, in this case situational variables, that contribute to the likelihood of behaviors related to sexual assault and harassment.

Remaining at the level of individual actors, Tosto and Bonnes (2026) examine how those in the military justice system attend to sexual violence, specifically how military lawyers construct victim legitimacy. They found that lawyers often cast doubt on victims’ credibility in subtle ways by questioning the harm done to the victim and differentiating it from the harm the victims perceived. Results also showed that lawyers engaged in myths associated with sexual misconduct; for example, although evidence shows that false reports represent only a very small proportion of sexual misconduct allegations, lawyers perpetuated myths, such as that the system encourages false reports or that people make false accusations to move to more desirable locations. The findings of Tosto and Bonnes again demonstrate the pernicious consequences for formal policies that informal culture can have. In this case, although the U.S. military has instituted numerous policies, programs, and trainings to alleviate sexual misconduct, informal cultures that undermine the policies make them less effective.

The articles in the volume demonstrate the complex outcomes of elements of military culture that have wide-ranging implications for service members. Lade and colleagues (2026) show this in interviews with women service members about their deployment experiences. They found that these service members had significant experience with military sexual misconduct and that it had wide-ranging implications. In particular, when sexual misconduct occurred, women felt undermined and unit cohesion suffered. In addition, participants described an ever-present sense of dread in environments in which sexual misconduct was present, such that they consistently felt that their contributions were being undervalued as women in a hypermasculine environment. The findings of Lade and colleagues are noteworthy in that they demonstrate that the effects of military sexual misconduct extend beyond the well-being of those who directly experience such misconduct. Unit cohesion suffers. Furthermore, the hypermasculine culture that tends to dominate in operational deployment contexts had wide-ranging negative effects on senses of acceptance and belonging among women in those contexts.

Finally, Johnstone and Tait-Signal (2023) investigate approaches to best understand sexual assault and harassment in military services. Specifically, they take as their primary task problematizing civil–military relations as the dominant theory for addressing the politics associated with civilian control of armed forces. They find the civil–military relations perspective lacking because it tends to not address gendered power relations and because attending to gender requires identifying problems with core values on which both military services and civilian society are built. Sexual misconduct is a serious, ongoing issue in both military and civilian societies, and recruits bring with them misogynistic beliefs they acquire in civilian society. Ultimately, Johnstone and Tait-Signal see the civil–military relations perspective as a useful framework to understand sexual misconduct in military services but only accompanied by an approach to broaden its conceptions of power to attend to culture and informal mechanisms. Johnson and Tait-Signal’s investigation, just like that of Wu and colleagues (2026), shows that changing cultural practices and belief systems is not easy, and any approach aimed at understanding culture change must attend to the complexities that produced the cultures in place.

The articles in this forum together make significant strides toward exposing the problem of sexual assault and harassment in military services and identifying solutions to address it. Perhaps the most significant theme that runs through the articles is the primacy of culture, both military and civilian. The articles collectively demonstrate that changing military culture is difficult, that structural changes to address sexual assault and harassment will not be effective if they conflict with existing military cultures, and that culture can have wide-ranging and unexpected negative consequences across a range of situations. The articles also reinforce what we see as the futility of zero-tolerance approaches to addressing sexual assault and harassment. These are complex issues with no panaceas that will resolve them, and zero-tolerance approaches often fail by ignoring cultural context, while reinforcing a hypermasculine mind-set that contributes to the problem, and reducing what the Forum articles reveal to be intricate and multifaceted processes to overly simplistic terms.