Jaysley Beck, a bright, energetic and kind teenager, had plenty to complain about during her final few months in the Army.
A senior NCO who was more than twice her age, the Royal Artillery Battery Sgt Maj, grabbed her while drunk, tried repeatedly to kiss her and scared her so much that she fled and slept the night in her car in case he came looking for her. When she tried to formally report it, her Captain told her she was making it up to get off exercise and urged her to think about the impact such a report would have on the BSM’s own career and family. Jaysley’s account of what happened was neatly sanitised and she was strongly encouraged to accept a letter of apology from the BSM who went on to promote. In the months to come, she began to experience what were essentially coercive and controlling behaviours by her line manager and we now know the full extent of his obsessive, stalking behaviours which manifested themselves in the more than 4500 text messages and hundreds of voice notes sent to her over a two month period. Jaysley’s friends urged her to report the line manager but she was afraid of being labelled a ‘female trouble-maker’. Other young women at the Inquest gave evidence more widely of the vile and degrading comments and behaviours of males from equivalent and higher ranks that they had to put up with – treatment that left them humiliated, despondent, scared and angry.
The Coroner has described these and other events in his detailed and highly critical conclusions delivered today (here in his Summing up), in which he has found that Army failings in the handling of Jaysley’s report of sexual assault and in failing to respond to what was known of the sexual harassment she was suffering, contributed to her death.
In its evidence to the Inquest, through Brig Melissa Emmett, the Army fully accepted that it had failed Jaysley (though it has not apologised for its unconscionable decision to assign some of the blame to her family in its own internal Service Inquiry report, published in 2023).
But what the Army still will not do is accept that there should be independent (ie non-Army) control of serious ‘service complaints’ of the kind that Jaysley would have been entitled, and should have been strongly encouraged and supported, to bring. (A ‘service complaint’ is a formal workplace grievance that is available to people in the armed forces and which is supposed to make up for the fact that they have such limited employment law rights. It does not work at all well and every year since 2010 has been declared to be ‘neither effective efficient or fair’, by the Service Complaints Ombudsman for the Armed Forces.)
The family wrote to the former Secretary of State for Defence Grant Shapps about this issue at the end of 2023 and he said he would look again at it. Luke Pollard MP, then in opposition, now Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces, also told the family that he was committed to ensuring that ‘victims of sexual harassment and abuse in our armed forces must have confidence in the processes that allow them to report their experiences and they must know that they will be listened to and that robust action will be taken.’ Copies of these letters can be accessed at the end of this blog.
But what the Army has announced during this inquest is that the Ministry of Defence has – again – rejected the proposal that there should be created, outside of the single services (Navy, Army, RAF), an independent body that would have responsibility for investigating and deciding on the most serious service complaints raising issues of serious discrimination or harassment. This had been recommended in 2019 by both the Wigston Review and in 2021 by the Atherton Review. At Jaysley’s inquest, it was explained that the issue had been considered and rejected again on the grounds that complaints must still be permitted to be handled by the services themselves, ‘as the provider of the the environment in which the complaint arose’.
We are not saying that all cases need independent handling. Most will not. But the most serious ones do. If there was real independence in the system, then more people – young women like Jaysley – might actually try and raise concerns about the things they are going through in the first place and might not suffer in silence like she did. Surely this is worth a try. We know from the last armed forces survey that almost 90% of service personnel who describe experiencing bullying, harassment or discrimination do not make a formal complaint about it at all. It is time to force the Army (and the Navy and RAF) to drop their indefensible narrative that they know what is best for their people and can be trusted to handle complaints that raise the most serious allegations of bullying and discrimination competently and fairly.
There will be many aspects of this tragic case to reflect upon in the coming weeks. Jaysley’s family have endured an extremely difficult three years since her death. They have had to listen to the Army admit how they ‘let Jaysley down in so many ways.’ But one thing is clear today. Continuing to permit the single services to mark their own homework when some of their people are accused of the most appalling behaviours simply doesn’t work. It is enormously disappointing that the new Government has not taken this opportunity to make its mark on this issue.
Watch our Director and the Service Complaints Ombudsman for the Armed Forces discuss the issue of sexual harassment in the armed forces, here on Channel 4 News.
Letter to SoSD from Beck family_Redacted
Response from Sec of State for Defence-EN20250216191013154_Redacted