On 16/09/26, two officers were acquitted at court martial in Catterick of the service offences of conduct prejudicial to good order and service discipline in relation to their handling of Jaysley’s original allegation against a Warrant Officer (who has subsequently been convicted of sexual assault).
Upon the acquittal, Leighann McCready, Jaysley’s mother said:
We want to start by saying that we respect the decision of the court martial today, as of course we must, and we recognise that the two defendants have been acquitted. We also wish to thank the judge for his kind remarks and expressions of sympathy for the family.
Nothing was ever going to bring Jaysley back. But today marks the end of a long and very sad journey for Jaysley and for our family. We know, because the coroner found after a ten day inquest, that the Army failed to take appropriate disciplinary action against a Warrant Officer who had sexually assaulted her; and it failed to take action in relation to the harassment she suffered at the hands of another male, her line manager – harassment that continued for months. Those failings contributed to her death. Those findings still stand. Despite the outcome of these court martial proceedings, it remains true to say that the Army let our daughter down very badly.
Even during this trial, the court heard evidence that senior soldiers making passes at junior colleagues was not at all unusual – what does that tell you about the culture? And it continues to cause us enormous pain to know that one of the first people who Jaysley spoke to just thought she was making up a serious allegation to get out of exercise. We can never forgive that.
The experiences of our daughter in the British Army – and the outcome today – do not fill us with optimism that young women being preyed upon by their seniors will feel confident coming forward. We will continue to spend our time and our energies working to improve the armed forces for our service people and in our daughter’s name.
Emma Norton, from the Centre for Military Justice, that acts for Jaysley’s family, said:
‘Lots of women in the military are able to achieve fantastic things in their careers – and Jaysley loved her job until her final months and excelled at it. But what we have learned is that when things go wrong, they can go catastrophically wrong. Though an adult, Jaysley was so young and had such little power or control over the dysfunctional men whose conduct we heard so much about at her inquest and during this trial. What is absolutely clear is that Jaysley could not rely upon the Army to help her identify and deal with the behaviours she was experiencing and today’s verdict brings no further accountability for those failings, of which the Coroner was rightly so critical. How we can better support young women going into this environment to understand, identify and deal with behaviours like those perpetrated against Jaysley, as well as the less extreme but nonetheless toxic behaviours others have described, is something the military must address radically and urgently.’
16/09/26
For a summary of the Coroner’s original findings, see this post.