When we talk about military trauma, we tend to picture the direct, visceral aftermath of combat. But often, trauma comes not from bullets or bombs but from bearing witness to the gendered violence that festers in warzones, peacekeeping missions, and even disaster-affected communities at home.
Australian Defence Force personnel are increasingly deployed to environments where sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is not incidental but systemic. They may respond to incidents, support survivors or observe consequences of sexual violence used as a weapon of war. On United Nations missions, they may be forced to reckon with the misconduct of other peacekeepers. During domestic operations, they may quietly assist women escaping family violence in evacuation centres. These experiences are rarely discussed but can leave deep and lasting marks.
The Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide has rightly focused national attention on the systemic factors that contribute to mental ill-health. As we consider how best to support those who serve, it’s time to confront a quieter kind of exposure—one that involves not kinetic trauma but moral injury and emotional dissonance.
SGBV exposure takes many forms. Some members are directly involved in responding to incidents: investigating allegations, managing survivor disclosures, or supporting local authorities. Others experience it indirectly—through briefing reports, survivor testimonies or the quiet realities of day-to-day operations in communities where violence against women and children is endemic.
There is also a third kind of exposure: the moral kind. This arises when personnel are unable to act on what they know or see: when a logistician on a peacekeeping mission watches UN colleagues flout the protections they’re meant to uphold; when a junior medic treats a child with injuries consistent with sexual violence, but has no clear pathway to intervene; or when a soldier witnesses abuse by local forces, is told to stand down because doing anything about it would fall outside the mandate, and later confides in a chaplain, having been profoundly shaken by an inability to stop the abuse.
Rather than physical, this injury is mental and emotional—a slow erosion of the sense of right and wrong, of duty and purpose.
No publicly available Australian research on the effect of SGBV on deployed personnel was found during the research for this article. There is also limited research on the effects of SGBV exposure on military members internationally. However, in 2018, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam published a study examining the Dutch experience with bacha bazi: the sexual exploitation of boys by local powerbrokers in Uruzgan, Kunduz, Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif.
The study explored the moral dilemma faced by Dutch soldiers who were required to maintain working relationships with local forces that either participated in or tolerated the abuse. The sexual exploitation was found to have violated both the moral and legal standards of the Dutch military and was experienced by personnel as a ‘morally and culturally critical situation’. A similar study noted that US and Canadian personnel were also infuriated by the practice and struggled to work with local forces who treated children so badly.
Many Dutch personnel reported feeling powerless to act. As members of the International Security Assistance Force, they were mandated under UN resolutions to protect civilians. But as guests in a sovereign state, they lacked authority to intervene. The absence of clear guidelines from their chain of command shifted the burden of response onto deployed members, compounding their sense of moral injury. The same policy gap was identified in the US and Canadian contexts. While the Australian context differs, the dilemmas faced by Dutch, US and Canadian personnel are echoed in the experiences of our own deployed forces.
Moral injury was first recognised in military personnel returning from operations involving events that transgressed their core beliefs and values. While not a mental health disorder, it has been linked to post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and suicidal ideation. Research from Syracuse University’s Moral Injury Project highlights ‘the inability or failure to report knowledge of a sexual assault or rape committed against oneself, a fellow service member or civilians’ as a potential cause. This is particularly relevant for members who encounter SGBV but lack the ability, or permission, to act.
This isn’t a criticism of Defence’s mental health efforts—far from it. There is strong and growing recognition of the importance of psychological resilience and trauma-informed care. The challenge now is to build on that foundation, expanding support to include the kinds of exposures that don’t involve physical threat but still carry emotional and ethical weight.
That means equipping leaders and clinicians to recognise when SGBV exposure may be a factor in a member’s distress. It means creating safe spaces to debrief morally confronting situations. And it means valuing the invisible labour performed by those who bear witness: whether in conflict zones, peacekeeping camps or evacuation centres.
In the wake of the critical work of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide, there is an opportunity to bring this conversation to the fore. SGBV exposure is not a fringe issue; it is an operational reality, and one that touches all military personnel.
We train our people to be resilient in the face of violence. We owe it to them to also prepare and support them for the quieter, more insidious forms of harm—the ones that test not just body, but conscience.