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How British military failed child sexual abuse victim [1]

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Date: 2025-01

In 1985, Jessica* celebrated her seventh birthday in a divided Europe.

Germany, where she lived on an estate for military families bordering a British army base, was divided into east and west, capitalist and communist. The Berlin Wall, which would not fall for another four years, was still splitting a city, country and world into a stalemate that had lasted for decades.

As tensions grew on either side of the Iron Curtain so, too, did the population of the mini-Britain in the Rhineland. Some 58,000 British troops were stationed in Germany in the 1980s, and many had with them wives and children.

For anyone in Europe at that time, the threat of nuclear catastrophe was never far away. But for these army kids, known as ‘pad brats’, childhood more closely resembled a Famous Five novel than the chilling horror of Where the Wind Blows. On the ‘patch’ – the colloquial name given to housing estates for army families that ringed military bases – the real wars were not Cold, but fought over vigorous games of British Bulldog, kick the can, and hide and seek.

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Many of the pad brats I spoke to for this investigation remember life on the patch as a time of freedom, fun and mischief. Far from the terror of a nuclear winter, they recalled endless summer days spent on bikes, exploring orchards and rivers, pausing for a packed lunch of sandwiches and crisps.

“My childhood was amazing,” one pad brat told me, reminiscing about lifelong friendships forged in the unique shared experience of growing up as a forces kid. Another shared how she and a fellow pad brat remained “best friends” their whole lives, until her friend sadly passed away. They described having “heaps of freedom”, the kind that seems unimaginable in today’s world of helicopter parenting. And while the patches were in the heart of mainland Europe, families lived in an “English bubble”, cheering the national team in the World Cup and waving Union Jacks in celebration of the Royal Wedding.

It’s easy to look back on the image of children wandering into the woods, playing hide and seek in fields that backed onto a Nazi-era concentration camp, a football under one arm and a pocket stuffed with Riesen chocolates, and feel nostalgic for a lost era of childhood freedom and endless curiosity.

The reality of patch life, however, was much darker.

Pad brats told openDemocracy of being subject to horrific bullying, including physical attacks by their peers. One woman described how aged 11, she was so terrified to get on the school bus, where she faced daily beatings and harassment, that she wet herself with fear. There was no authority to appeal to for help – if anything, teachers joined in.

Domestic abuse was described to me as “rife”. Men, including those struggling with conflict-induced post-traumatic stress disorder, often took their aggression out on their family as the military turned a blind eye to terror in the home. Some men “bullied and hit their wives”, said one former army wife. Pad brat Angela*, speaking out about her experience for the first time, described how her father “tried to murder me when I was a teenager”.

“With regards to his trauma, he definitely took that out on me,” Angela told me. “What he did, it would now be categorised as abuse. He got away with trying to kill me.” Despite the violence she endured, Angela still has a relationship with her dad. “It took a lot of understanding on my part,” she said, “but there were reasons behind his behaviour and that was linked to his trauma.”

Other former pad brats spoke of friends whose dads took their own lives or were lost in conflict zones. Death, trauma and violence were all part of patch life, where the army was employer, landlord, school teacher and doctor. Military dentists treated childhood toothache, while military doctors offered treatment with a trademark army brutality that required even mothers giving birth in army hospitals to stand to attention. “There was no gesture of care or kindness, even for children struggling in pain,” said Angela.

It was in this world of freedom, bike rides, big open spaces, tight-knit community, military hierarchies, hidden violence, trauma and conflict, family isolation and deliberate silences, where Jessica grew up and Martin Roberts came of age.

And it was in this world, when Jessica was seven years old and Roberts 16, that he began his months-long campaign of sexual abuse against her.

The Rhineland

“We had it drummed into us that the army is your family,” Jessica told me during one of several Zoom calls we had earlier this year. “We were told, you all look after each other, you’re comrades, you’re brothers in arms. It was the same for the wives and children.”

But when it came to protecting victims of child sexual abuse, “none of that was true”, said Jessica. “It was just a facade.”

Jessica’s father was an army man, and she spent her early years on a patch near Munster in north-west Germany with him, her mother and her brother. Like many of the pad brats I spoke to, Jessica remembers having a lot of freedom as a child: playing out, building dens and exploring the countryside. Aerial photos of the patch show a housing estate backing onto wide green spaces, with the army base nearby.

Roberts was born in Germany and grew up on the same patch as Jessica, where his father was a non-commissioned officer (NCO) who rose to the rank of staff sergeant. Roberts was keen to follow in his footsteps: by 1985, he was in the Junior Leaders – the name given to the boys’ service training regiments that the British Army operated between the 1950s and 1990s. Here, boys as young as 15 were taught infantry and leadership skills to prepare them for rank.

Members of the ARRSE forum – an online space for British army personnel, veterans and enthusiasts – reflected on how the Junior Leaders trained them for army life. Leaders were “fitter, had better military skills, and were better prepared for joining working units”, one wrote; another noting they were “trained to a far higher standard than depot recruits on a larger variety of weapons”.

It wasn’t all about training and exercise. One member of the forum commented on the culture, saying being in the leaders “just increased the levels of brainwashing”.

The patch was a tight-knit community. Families knew each other, and older children mixed with the younger ones, often providing childcare. There were no grandparents nearby, no aunties to help out mums desperate for a night off. Parents were isolated from traditional support networks, and so relied on teenagers and young squaddies to babysit.

Court documents obtained by openDemocracy show Roberts’ campaign of abuse against Jessica took place in a number of locations around the patch. This included in his family home, where he took her to the cellar on the pretence of seeing a potters’ wheel and assaulted her. He also assaulted her in a hedge that children used as a den.

But it was getting a job as the family’s babysitter that allowed him to escalate his abuse, gaining access to Jessica’s home where she was entitled to feel safe. Here, the abuse became more and more severe. While babysitting one evening, he sexually assaulted Jessica by inserting a candle into her vagina. On other occasions, he orally and vaginally raped her.

In order to maintain control and to guarantee her silence, Jessica says Roberts took an obscene photo of her. She alleged that he threatened if she ever spoke out, he would share the photo and her father would lose his job. It was an empty threat – there is no doubt that if Roberts had shown the photo to anyone, it would be him, not her dad, in trouble. But Jessica did not know that. She was a child. She was terrified.

“I had no voice when I was seven,” Jessica said. “But I want him to know that I never forgot what he had done.”

The abuse stopped after around five months. Roberts graduated from the Junior Leaders and entered the army. But Jessica told me that his intimidation of her continued.

“I was nine years old with my mum, and I saw him,” she told me. Roberts, she remembers, was now in the army and wearing his casual army uniform with the sleeves rolled up. “I drew in really close to my mum because I was frightened,” she said. “And he shouted ‘hey sexy’ at me. I was a child.” At the time, Jessica added, her mum had thought Roberts was talking to her and stopped to chat to him while she waited, terrified, at her side.

I spoke to a range of academics and experts who work with survivors of child sexual abuse over the course of this investigation. They shared insights into how places built on male power and maintained through hierarchical structures lend themselves to abuse.

The army has always been a patriarchal institution built on strict hierarchies. There were strict gender roles on the patches of the 1980s. Unlike their children, wives had very little freedom. One army wife told me how if a woman was seen out with someone who was not her husband, within minutes it would be all around the patch and an officer would call to ask what was going on. Another woman who grew up a pad brat shared how, as recently as the 1980s, her dad prioritised education for his sons, and she was not expected to go to university or have a career.

Roberts was abusing a girl within this context, in a place where there was an expectation for men to exert their power and authority, often through fights or by terrorising someone they perceived as weaker. Sexual abuse provides a means for men and boys to prove themselves through violence and aggression. Rape is rarely a crime solely about sexual gratification, although that is part of it. It is also about power, and an abuser enjoying how that power makes them feel.

As for Jessica, the abuse was happening in an institution she had been told to consider her ‘family’. When abuse happens in insular institutions, there is huge pressure on the victim to remain silent, with abusers persuading them that if they tell, they will cause a catastrophe. Roberts was no exception. Jessica was forced to believe that if she spoke out, the army would kick out her dad and disown her family.

It would be another decade before Jessica felt able to tell the army what had happened to her. But rather than protect and support her, the army ‘family’ closed ranks around her abuser.

The data

I have spent much of the past year investigating abuse in the British armed forces. I have uncovered how running its own judiciary – including police services and military courts (court martials) – has enabled the military to conceal sexual abuse by soldiers against both fellow servicemen and women, as well as civilians and sex workers overseas.

Now, I have turned my focus onto the abuse of children by military personnel, including against dependents such as Jessica. To understand the scale of child sexual abuse in the armed forces, I dug into 14 years of court martial data published by the Ministry of Defence.

Between 1 January 2010 and 12 August 2024, there were 944 court martials for sexual offences, of which 155 involved charges of sexual crimes against children. This is likely an undercount, as the records are not required to mention the victim’s age.

There were 22 occasions where rape and buggery, or attempted rape and buggery, were tried alongside charges of specific child sex offences at court martial. While buggery was removed from the statute books in 2003 and is now classed as rape, non-recent offences are still tried under the old law.

Even an underestimate indicates that at least 2.4% of all people tried in court martials in the past 14 years faced charges related to child abuse, the majority of whom were found guilty. The National Crime Agency estimates child sex abuse offenders account for up to 1.6% of the general adult population in the UK, meaning the rate is slightly higher in the military than in civilian life. It is worth noting that one might expect the figure to be higher in the military as child abuse is more commonly committed by men, who make up 89% of the armed forces but only 49% of the general population.

The majority of child sexual offence charges heard at court martial related to image-based abuse. “Viewing sexual images of children is not a victimless crime,” said Tom Squire, head of clinical engagement at Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a charity that campaigns against child sexual abuse. He warned that “viewing the images fuels the demand for more and a cycle of abuse continues.”

Other serious offences included sexual activity with a family member, sexual assaults of children under 13, arranging for a child to be sexually exploited abroad, indecent conduct towards a young child, and grooming.

Court martial data reveal only part of the picture, as not all reported incidents result in charges. My analysis of service police data reveals that between the start of 2021 and the end of 2023, less than half of all sexual offences investigated were referred to the prosecuting authority. A quarter were dismissed, while the remainder were still under investigation as of March 2024, when the most recent data was released.

Data from the same years reveals there were 30 investigations into recent sexual offences where the victim was recorded as being under 18, including at least three rapes and 16 sexual assaults. Before 2021, service police did not record whether a victim was a child, only that they were aged under 21.

Further analysis shows that since 2015, the service police investigated 47 reports of non-recent child sexual abuse alleged to have taken place between the 1960s and 2000s. More than half the reports involved incidents in Germany, where Jessica was abused by Roberts.

These represent official figures. But other sources shed yet more light on the situation. In 2014, the UK government established an Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in the wake of the Jimmy Savile sex abuse scandal. As part of this, an initiative to give survivors a chance to tell their story – known as the Truth Project – was launched.

One of the victims who contributed to the project was Janice*, who grew up in military accommodation when her father served in the British Army. He started abusing her when she was 11 years old.

Janice told the Truth Project she “can’t remember a time … when abuse was not happening in one form or another”. For years, Janice blocked out the memories, but it all came “flooding back” as an adult. Today, she finds it difficult to trust people. Conflict, she said, “is terrifying”.

Angela, who told me how her father tried to kill her as a teenager, was also a witness to military child sexual abuse. She described how two girls living across the road from her family in Germany were sexually abused by their own father. “I knew something had gone badly wrong,” she said. “My parents were worried it had happened to me, too, because I would go over there. But I don’t have any memory of that.”

The Truth Project found that 1% of reports from project participants related to the armed forces. Jessica believes the true numbers are much higher. One woman, whom Jessica met as an adult, shared with her how she had been sexually abused by a member of the military as a child. In her case, the abuser disappeared from the regiment. “There was no arrest, no charge,” Jessica said. “He was moved on.”

Today, Jessica runs a support group for other survivors of child sexual abuse in military settings, both male and female. Within a month of setting up a private group for survivors, more than 80 people got in touch. But, she told me, there is still a “culture of silence” that means no one wants to discuss this abuse.

“In an online forum for former forces kids, there was a discussion about babysitters,” Jessica said. “A lot of people were sharing fun stories, and then a few people started to say no, actually, it was horrific, I was abused, I was sexually abused.”

Jessica planned to take their names down so she could reach out to those who felt able to speak out. But when she returned to the forum, which was moderated by other former pad brats, the discussion had been deleted.

“It made me angry,” she said. “If I'd made a thread of something like, ‘ex-military kids favourite songs of the 80s’ they would post that. It's the stigma and taboo of child abuse. A lot of people don't want to think about it.”

Which, for decades, was exactly what happened to Jessica.

The nightmares

Jessica’s dad left the army in 1990, when she was 11. The family moved to England, where her ordeal continued throughout her teenage years. “I started to struggle, and then I started to realise what had happened to me,” Jessica said. “Every year I got older, I understood more and more the severity of why I was feeling what I was feeling. And I did struggle.”

Meanwhile, Roberts continued his career in the army. “So from a teenager to a man, he was in the armed forces,” Jessica said. As he rose up the ranks, Jessica experienced constant flashbacks of the abuse he’d committed against her. Every night since being a teenager, she said, “I relived the abuse. I didn’t sleep at night, instead I would be remembering.”

Jessica didn’t want to remember. Her mental health suffered. She started to drink heavily, sometimes blacking out. She also developed a deep-seated fear of intimacy – a common impact of childhood sexual abuse. “I didn’t understand how relationships worked,” she said.

Then, in 2002, she found the courage to finally report Roberts’ crimes.

The Lisanelly barracks in Omagh, Northern Ireland, provided a base for the British Army’s 1st Battalion of the Prince of Wales’ Own Regiment of Yorkshire in the early 2000s. A few years earlier, the town had suffered a deadly IRA bombing, four months after the Good Friday Agreement referendum paved the way to the formal end of the Troubles. On that tragic day, the barracks became a makeshift morgue. By 2007 it would close down for good.

In 2002, though, it was still Jessica’s local regiment, and the one she contacted to report Roberts. With the support of her mum, she explained what had happened to her, hoping the Ministry of Defence (MoD) would investigate Roberts and hold him to account. “The first crime reference number I had was from the MoD,” she said. “Even if they had not found him guilty, I think if at that time they had investigated it, it would have helped me move forward.”

It made sense for Jessica to report to the regiment. Back on the patch, “if you were in trouble, it was the military police that knocked on your door,” she explained. Now, she was in trouble, and the man who caused the trouble was born into and served in the British military. That same military had a duty to help her.

The Navy, Army and Air Force each has a dedicated police service to investigate both crimes specific to the military – such as going absent without leave – and serious criminal conduct, including rape and sexual assault committed by serving personnel and their dependants.

A victim can choose to report sexual offences to either the military or civilian justice systems, although there are no firm rules on which system has jurisdiction over these crimes. What is clear, however, is that any crimes involving serving personnel or the dependents of serving personnel can be investigated by the military police. This means that, as dependents of soldiers, Jessica was entitled to protection under the military justice system, and Roberts was subject to military law.

Jessica had grown up being told the army was family, and that it would protect her. The abuse took place within an army setting, by a teenage boy living under army rules. She trusted them to look out for her – to listen and to investigate when she disclosed the abuse.

Instead, she said, “I was let down by the MoD. It was like they couldn’t get away from me quick enough.”

On 5 July 2002, Jessica received a letter, seen by openDemocracy, from a junior adjutant – a military post mainly responsible for administrative duties – telling her that “we were not able to track down the alleged culprit in this case because it involves a different regiment”.

The letter shocked Jessica’s family. “My dad is ashamed of being in the army now,” Jessica said. “He did his full 22 years. And before, he looked on that time with pride. But he could not believe they asked a junior adjutant to send a letter to a child sexual abuse victim.”

“The army said it was ‘not our jurisdiction’,” Jessica continued. “Yes it was. My dad was based there. I would not have been abused if he was not in the army. They asked me: ‘was it on British soil?’ There were thousands of British people living in this area. We felt British. But no. They didn’t want to touch it. Their slogan is ‘no defence of abuse.’ It should be ‘no defence of abuse victims.’

“They said I was a civilian, I was a dependent, so they wouldn’t investigate, blaming it on a jurisdiction issue. Yet, we had lived under the army umbrella. The army was family. The message was, you abide by our rules. We were institutionalised. But when something happened to me in that institution, I was on my own.”

Roberts was, at this point, based in Germany and no longer in the service, meaning the MoD considered Germany to have primary responsibility for any investigation.

The letter confirmed that Jessica’s details would be passed on to the Army Welfare Service (AWS). In a subsequent letter, dated 11 July 2002, the AWS stated: “You are a victim and you should attach no blame to yourself for what happened. You and your mother have been very brave to come forward at this time.”

The AWS referred the case to the PSNI, the civilian police service in Northern Ireland. The PSNI said that because the crime took place in Germany, which had primacy in the investigation, it would refer it to Interpol, and would be in touch with her after it had translated her statement.

On 10 May 2004, two years after she first reported Roberts, Jessica inquired about the status of her case. A second letter arrived from the AWS, confirming that “because these alleged incidents happened in Germany … it was decided that the German authorities would deal with this matter.” I contacted the letter’s author for an interview but received no response.

The letter made no sense. The military justice system was set up precisely for these kinds of situations: to ensure British army personnel and their dependents are subject to, and protected by, British military law even when overseas – intended to ensure army personnel will not have to navigate the legal systems of foreign states.

To this day, Jessica said she has received no explanation from the MoD for the 2002 decision – nor has she received any apology.

A final letter, sent 18 days later by the PSNI, stated that “a request for an update … was forwarded to lnterpol, London. To date no reply has been received. When a reply has been received all interested parties will be informed of the position.”

Although Jessica didn’t know it then, that was the last time she would hear from either the military or the PSNI for 18 years.

The UK

The nightmares and flashbacks did not stop. Jessica relived the abuse night after night. “I was remembering, ready for when I would have the chance to tell the police, a court,” she said. “I couldn’t forget, I had to remember.”

The memories and fear impacted her relationship with her own children. She could never relax, and described a glass wall between her and the rest of her family. She was always afraid for her children's safety.

Sometimes, Jessica would wonder what Roberts was doing. Not much information is publicly available about his life, but it is known that at some point he had a child, left the army in the early 2000s, and his relationship broke down. He met a new partner, became a stepfather to their children, and settled in Germany. He also became a grandfather for the first time in May this year.

“It used to play on my mind a lot, whether he felt guilty about it,” Jessica said. “Does he ever think about it? Probably not. Not realising the consequences, or that I think about it every night of my life. I’m lying awake or having nightmares, angry about the life I could have had.”

All this time, Jessica waited, and waited. She waited for the PSNI, for Interpol, for the MoD, to contact her. But nothing happened. There was no word, no update, and no justice.

In 2020, as the world went into Covid-19 lockdown, Jessica decided she’d had enough. She hadn’t been listened to in 2002. But since then, the UK government had launched its Independent Child Sexual Abuse Inquiry, supported by the National Police Chiefs Council’s Hydrant Programme, which aims to improve the investigation of child sexual abuse. Perhaps now she would be heard.

“I started to really think about it again,” she told me. “I felt there had been an injustice. And so I rang around, to see if the military police could help me. I spoke to one officer, and gave him the military crime reference number. He told me they had a description of the offences on record, and the name of the perpetrator.”

Jessica still struggles to say his name aloud.

“It was all there,” she said.

A sergeant from the military police contacted the PSNI to find out what had happened with Interpol. Jessica then learnt the statement she had made to the police back in 2002 had disappeared. All the PSNI had was her crime reference number.

The news was devastating. “Where was my statement, where was my voice?” she asked me. “If anyone else came forward about him, there would be no record that he’d been reported previously.”

By this point, Jessica had submitted her experience to the Truth Project, which led to a call from the MoD. Officers had seen her testimony. From 2021, the case came under UK jurisdiction, with the Service Police assisting in the initial stages of the incident and then taking primacy on leading on the investigation.

“These were the same people who 19 years before told me they couldn’t investigate because of a jurisdiction issue,” Jessica said. “Who didn’t want to touch it because it would give them a headache. Nothing had changed. The laws were the same as in 2002, when these same people said they could not take it on. I was surprised. I was really shocked. They could have done something when I first reported it.”

Her case raises questions of significant failings in the military when it comes to investigating abuse. Why, when it received reports of a child abuser in its institution, did it fail to take action? Why did Interpol fail to push the case forward? And what crimes could have been allowed to happen, in its failure to listen to and support victims and survivors?

These questions remain unanswered.

In 2022, two decades after Jessica first told the MoD, Roberts was arrested. “I was petrified,” Jessica said. Roberts had exerted control over her as a girl, using the alleged photo and his status as an older male as his weapons to maintain her silence. Now, she had spoken up, and she was terrified he would come after her. “The year and a half after he was first arrested, it was horrific,” she told me. “I was hyper-vigilant, that he would come and get me.”

On 29 January 2024, at 9.45am, Martin Julian Roberts was brought before Assistant Judge Advocate General Andrew Desmond Smith at Catterick Military Court in North Yorkshire, where he pleaded not guilty to multiple charges of indecency with a child, including the incidents of oral rape and sexual assault by penetration with a candle, one charge of taking an indecent photograph of a child and one charge of rape.

Roberts, who was now 55, faced the court martial as a civilian, but one subject to the military justice system due to being the dependent of his staff sergeant father at the time of the offending.

For nearly three decades, Jessica had relived the abuse through nightmares and flashbacks, remembering for the day when she could hold the man who had abused her to account. Now, her trauma would be heard in court. She had no voice when she was seven, no voice as a teenager. She has a voice now.

Catterick Military Court

Leading the British Army’s case against Roberts was the Service Prosecuting Authority’s Rupert Gregory, a barrister with 26 years experience, while Frances Pencheon was defending him. I approached the SPA, Gregory and Pencheon for an interview to support this investigation, but they did not respond.

Gregory faced a challenge – constructing the prosecution’s case for offences that took place almost 30 years previously. Defence lawyer Lisa Nichol, who has worked on cases of non-recent sexual abuse, explained that in these instances, “it becomes very difficult to rely on forensic evidence”. As a result, Nichol said, “evidence in cases of historic sexual offences often comprises witness evidence, police interviews, and records such as medical, school and social care.”

She continued: “Historic cases pose significant challenges, especially given the emotive issues that surround child sexual abuse, that are unlike traditional criminal trials. Each case is unique, containing very different challenges and implications, and time delays mean the gathering and analysis of historic evidence is crucial.”

The prosecution might not have had forensic evidence. But Gregory did have Jessica’s voice, her determination, and the years of distressing and frightening flashbacks that had preserved the memory of Roberts’ abuse.

“The police and everyone couldn’t believe how well I remembered everything,” she told me. “But I had been reliving it every night.”

Jessica initially planned to face Roberts in court. “I wanted him to look at me and see how it affected me,” she said. When the day came, however, she completely broke down in tears. Even 30 years on, the fear he exerted over her remained so powerful and she was petrified of seeing him. Tearful and distressed, she opted to give her evidence behind a screen. “I was still too frightened of him,” she explained.

By refusing to plead guilty, Roberts forced a trial. It was now up to the prosecution to prove his guilt, while the defence sought to pick holes in Jessica’s evidence. Pencheon questioned her memory, suggesting that this was a case of mistaken identity, and that the true abuser was another boy on the patch. It was, insisted Jessica, “offensive to me”.

During the trial, Jessica shared how she had previously been sexually abused by an older boy, when she was just a toddler, when her dad was serving in England. “I disclosed this as I didn’t know if it would come up or not,” she explained. “I don’t really remember the abuse. And the defence tried to use that against me. But it’s quite common for abuse victims to be abused more than once.”

All the while, Roberts maintained his innocence. It didn’t work. Because he was tried as a civilian, Roberts’ case was heard by a court martial board made up of other civilians. Following the barristers’ closing statements, it took them a mere three hours to reach their decision.

Roberts was guilty on eight counts of indecency with a child and one count of rape – nine guilty verdicts altogether. As no evidence was offered regarding an indecent photo of a child, he was found not guilty on that charge.

It didn’t matter. Jessica had won.

The sentencing

On 23 July 2024, Roberts returned to Catterick Court to be sentenced. He arrived at the court in jeans and a sweater, sitting hunched and impassive throughout proceedings. Meanwhile, myself, Jessica, Gregory and a representative from the charity Aurora, which specialises in military abuse and had supported Jessica throughout the trial, dialled in to watch remotely.

Proceedings started late due to technical difficulties. From my office at home, I watched Roberts sitting in the plain courtroom, and listened to Jessica’s pre-recorded victim impact statement, where she described the long-term trauma she had suffered.

“It wasn’t just a year or two for me,” she told the court via a video, occasionally wiping away tears. “It’s been 20 years of trying to get accountability for what he’s done.”

The defence had put forward numerous arguments for mitigating circumstances that would reduce Roberts’ sentence. Pencheon raised concerns about his health and how being held in a British prison would mean separating him from his family in Germany, including the two-month-old grandson he had never met. The arguments were dismissed by the judge.

But it was the defence’s argument that his crime was “only just a rape” that drew gasps from attendees.

“That will always stick in my head,” Jessica said to me afterwards. “A detective told me that, as a child, I probably blocked out [the full extent of] what actually happened. I told the court what I remembered. And the defence said that was barely rape. It will stick in my head.”

Judge Smith rejected the argument. “I am not attracted by any submissions that if it was a rape … it was only just a rape,” he told the court, before praising Jessica and saying he hoped that the verdict would mean she “could now start to have the closure she so richly deserves.”

He then proceeded to hand down his sentence. For eight counts of indecency with a child and one count of rape, Roberts received four years in custody, of which two would be served on licence, meaning he would be released from prison after two years. Should he fail to follow certain rules after release, such as maintaining regular contact with a probation officer, committing a criminal offence, or leaving the country without permission, then he would be returned to prison.

The short sentence was, frankly, shocking. Two years in prison for raping a seven-year-old child felt disturbingly low, and left Jessica feeling “deflated”.

“He got a slap on the wrists for raping someone,” she said, when we spoke a week after the sentencing. “I worry that it will put other victims off coming forward. But then I remember, he is waking up in prison.”

The low sentence was explained, in part, because Roberts was a minor when the offences were committed, at a time when sentencing guidelines were far weaker on child sex offences than they are today. If Roberts had committed his crimes after the introduction of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, the sentence would have been closer to 14 years. Two of the indecency offences would have been tried as sexual assault with penetration and (oral) rape, both of which carry much harsher penalties than they did in 1985, as does the rape charge.

To understand how Roberts’ sentence fits into wider patterns, I analysed court martial sentences for child sex offences. Since 2010, just under a third (32%) of defendants received a custodial sentence, 29% received a community sentence, and 21% received a suspended sentence. The use of suspended sentences has increased over the past two years.

Judge Smith previously gave a suspended sentence to a 17-year-old guilty of two incidents of sexual assault by penetration while the victim was in hospital earlier this year. As serving military personnel are only allowed to speak to journalists with MoD consent, I was unable to talk to the victim, however the charity Aurora shared details of the sentencing with the victim’s consent.

In comparison, 2022 data from civilian courts show that nearly half (45%) of defendants who were found guilty of child sexual abuse offences received an immediate custodial sentence, one-third (33%) received a suspended sentence, and one-fifth (20%) received a community sentence. However, this is only data from a single year, and the disparity may reflect a difference in the severity of the crimes, as well as whether the offences took place after 2003.

My findings fit into wider concerns that victims of sexual offences see worse outcomes in military courts than the civilian justice system. Previously, openDemocracy revealed that fewer than a quarter (23%) of the 93 rape cases heard in court martials between January 2018 and April 2024 resulted in a guilty verdict, compared to an average 70% conviction rate for rape cases heard in civilian courts.

“For all its very considerable flaws, the civilian justice system is a better place to be for victims,” said Emma Norton, founder of The Centre For Military Justice. “Not only because rape victims are more likely to see their rapist convicted in a civilian court, but also because of the considerable amount of work now being put into reforming the system which are changing the way civilian police are investigating sexual crime. The military justice system remains largely insulated from these reforms and improvements.

“We remain of the view that the presumption must be for sexual assault cases to be handled in the civil not military system.”

An MOD Spokesperson said: “Sexual offences are not acceptable in the Armed Forces. We take any allegations extremely seriously and encourage anyone who has experienced or witnessed this type of behaviour, whenever it happened, to report it immediately.

“We expect the highest standards from our personnel, and through our Zero Tolerance policies, anyone convicted of a sexual offence will be discharged.

“Our zero tolerance approach also underlines our absolute commitment to providing a safe and supportive working environment for everyone in the Armed Forces.”

Jessica had hoped the guilty verdict would mean her fight for justice was finally over. Instead, she is now fighting to appeal Roberts’ low sentence, and will find out on 4 December if she has been successful.

“I’ve been trapped in a nightmare for 30 years,” she said. “But I’m glad I never gave up.”

Today, Jessica has finally started to sleep again. Since the court martial started, the nightmares that have plagued her for nearly three decades have finally begun to lessen.

If you have experienced military sexual abuse and would like to share your story, please contact [email protected].

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/child-sexual-abuse-british-military-army-germany-base-martin-roberts/

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