Bullying, harassment and discrimination appear to be rising in the UK armed forces, yet the numbers released may conceal a far larger problem.
Across the armed forces, reported cases of the three offences rose 29% between 2020 and 2024, increasing from 199 to 257, according to Freedom of Information (FOI) data from the Ministry of Defence.
In the same period, the Royal Air Force (RAF) saw the most significant rise, increasing by 100% from 31 cases to 62.
The Army saw an 18% increase from 130 to 154, while the Navy experienced an 8% increase from 38 to 41 cases.
Just 155 of the Armed Forces’ personnel filed reports of bullying, harassment or discrimination, between January and October 2025 – just 0.2% of the 181,000 active duty personnel, according to the FOI request from October 2025.
This represents 19 cases across the three offences in the Royal Navy, 31 in the RAF and 105 in the Army.
However, there are indications that these figures may not give the full picture.
Of those who have experienced bullying, harassment or discrimination in the last 12 months, around one in seven (14%) made a formal written complaint about their experience, according to the UK Regular Armed Forces Continuous Attitude Survey (AFCAS) Results 2025.
The report said that the main reasons why personnel do not make a formal written complaint continue to be ‘not believing anything would be done if a complaint was made (58%) and believing that it might adversely affect their career (51%).’
The AFCAS report concluded that 86% of personnel who have been subject to bullying, discrimination or harassment do not make a complaint.
Career fouling and a culture of silence
Sandeep Kaur Michael, a solicitor at the Centre for Military Justice (CMJ), an organisation that provides legal help to service members and their families, said fear and career- fouling (unfair actions by superiors that intentionally damage a subordinate’s career prospects) and an overcomplicated complaints process serve to silence those who experience mistreatment at the hands of their officers or their peers.
Their feedback from clients indicates that those who come forward are ‘career-fouled’, their future promotions blacklisted, and in some cases are even expelled from the armed forces.
She said: “We know that the vast majority of people who say they have experienced bullying in the Armed Forces do not report it.
“Almost 90% of those who said they had experienced this did not make a formal complaint about it.”
A Navy Able Rate II (a junior enlisted sailor), who has chosen to remain anonymous and will be referred to hereafter as Abraham, spoke of a bullying culture which often goes unreported.
However, unlike the top-down silence that Kaur Michael highlighted, it is one that is imposed by the junior personnel themselves.
He said: “I’m not surprised the numbers are so low. There is a lot of ‘banter’ that does go too far – the military is quite bad for it.
“A lot of people just sort of go with it, to try to fit in. They don’t report bullying because they’re afraid of what other people will think of them.”
Abraham said that if he were to make a complaint, fear of his peers’ opinions was of greater concern than those of senior officers involved in the complaints procedure.
The serving Navy Able Rate revealed that he and a colleague were once severely bullied by a Petty Officer.
He said: “He used to speak to us pretty awfully a lot of the time; insulting us whenever he told us to do something.”
Yet rather than go through the official channels, Abraham and his colleague, together with some Able Rate Is (a rank higher than Able Rate II), sat down with the abusive officer and discussed the issue with them.
Abraham added: “He did change for a little bit, but then he slipped back into his old ways.”
“But you are going to get people like that who are older in the military.
“When they joined years ago, they probably dealt with far worse. But at the same time, we all need to change with the times.”
Ex-Colonel Jeremy Morgan Pughe, formerly of the Royal Welsh Infantry, who retired in 2022 and served for 38 years said: “We’ve had a complete transition in the army we have today compared to the one I joined.
“Women weren’t allowed to be employed in 95% of the roles that were on offer in the Army, and you were discharged if you were discovered to be homosexual.
“Discrimination was casual, and it was commonplace.”
The armed forces are a unique profession, requiring a total commitment of all aspects of a person’s life.
But if things go wrong, and a peer or a superior is being abusive, as Kaur Michael put it: “You don’t get to clock out at 5 pm.”
This problem is especially severe for female personnel.
Female and Commonwealth soldiers
A woman in the Army is statistically four times more likely to be the subject of abuse than a female in the civilian workplace, according to Professor Anthony King, then Chair of War Studies at the University of Warwick, in his 2022 study, To Fight and Win.
In addition, the 2024 Service Complaints Ombudsman for the Armed Forces (SCOAF) report found that: “There is a clear disadvantage to the parties involved in complaints which relate to protected characteristics, such as race, sex, pregnancy and maternity, and poor behaviours.
“Female and ethnic minorities service personnel remain overrepresented within this category of complaint, and are therefore disproportionately affected by these failings within the system.”
This was echoed by Kaur Michael, who added: “This is a particular problem for women and racially minoritised personnel who are disproportionately more likely to experience this kind of problem.”
In 2021, the CMJ was counsel in the case of the late Gunner Jaysley Beck, who committed suicide following extended sexual assault and harassment by a superior officer and her line manager.
The subsequent inquest highlighted a substantial failure on the part of the Army’s complaints system.
It found that the failure to deal with Beck’s report, alongside the pressure of the assaults themselves, directly led to her suicide on 15 December 2021.
According to Pughe Morgan, recruits and officers are told in training to call out unacceptable behaviour, including bullying, harassment and discrimination.
He said: “There’s a zero tolerance for it.”
Yet, Abraham stated: “People rarely get reported when it comes to discrimination.”
“I think it should be done more when discrimination is experienced”
But according to the CMJ, personnel are victimised and ‘career-fouled’ when they do.
Kaur Michael described this threat as ‘existential’ for commonwealth soldiers, who are becoming an increasing percentage of the Armed Forces demographic.
Cases of discrimination are on the rise in the Armed Forces, with a 10% increase between 2020 and 2024, from 65 cases to 72.
Kaur Michael, who specialises in racial discrimination cases and is currently dealing with a number of such cases, added: “For Commonwealth recruits, the consequences are catastrophic.
“You lose your immigration status, you have 28 days to leave the country, and you’re then left trying to pursue a service complaint from abroad, which is practically impossible unless you have a lawyer helping you.”
However, Morgan Pughe, who worked for a time in the Army Personnel Centre said: “I don’t recall seeing any career-foulling or blackballing.
“People were not victimised or in any way set back by being whistleblowers, or by being open about things that have happened. In fact, people are encouraged to do so.”
While Kaur Michael sees the reported numbers of bullying, harassment, discrimination and other offences as far too low, Pughe Morgan claims that reporting has gone up in recent years.
He said: “The more you talk about bullying, harassment and discrimination, the more people start to feel they have suffered from it.
“I’ve seen the sense of victimhood grow a lot, and a lot of it is, in fact, a lack of career progression, lack of opportunities, other things that have grieved them, which they then turn into a complaint against their commander.
“People are very ready to complain. And quite often they were complaining about things which weren’t really serious complaints in my view.”
The status of the complaints system
Before 2025, cases of harassment, discrimination and bullying were handled by the services themselves which Kaur Michael described as the ‘military marking its own homework.’
But following extensive campaigns for greater scrutiny by organisations such as the CMJ on the back of cases like Jaisley Beck, it was announced that serious cases would now be handled by a Tri-Service commission.
However, little is known about how the new body will operate, who will staff it, or whether it will have genuine independence from the chain of command, according to the CMJ.
A new tri-service complaints team is also set be established to take the most serious allegations of bullying, harassment and discrimination out of the chain of command for the first time.
In September 2025, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced that further reforms are planned, including the creation of an Armed Forces Commissioner in 2026 with ‘greater and more far-reaching powers than currently possessed by the ombudsman,’ according to Veterans Minister Al Carns.
The MoD also highlighted the introduction of the MyComplaint app, which allows personnel to file and track complaints online, and a new quality assurance process for reviewing the handling of cases.
Morgan Pughe said: “There’s been a lot of progress in the last three years on the back of these very appalling cases like Jaisley Beck.
“The army should keep itself open to public scrutiny, and it should have non-military people looking in on it so that it is transparent.”
Furthermore, the MoD agreed to implement two new recommendations by January 2026.
The first is to adopt supplementary key performance indicators, in collaboration with the Ombudsman, to help deal with the range and complexity of complaints.
The second is to develop a formal process for handling mass complaints in collaboration with the Ombudsman’s office.
Kaur Michael said, “The system lacks teeth and independence. There’s a real hesitancy to acknowledge the problem and manage it effectively.
“The fix is simple: independent scrutiny. A completely independent body, with expertise in bullying, harassment and discrimination.
“There seems to be a fear of allowing in that scrutiny. If you genuinely care about underreporting, why wouldn’t you want the most robust complaints system possible?”
The Ministry of Defence were contacted for comment but declined to give a statement.
Main Image Credit: Ministry of Defence
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