After her decade-long fight before the military authorities and the courts for a sexual assault committed by her superior, and with this shocking book which denounces the actions of the army, ex-corporal Stéphanie Raymond says today: “ Mission accomplished “.
Because her mission was to obtain justice and ensure that “the parallel justice system that is military justice and the Court Martial” is known to the public, she indicated in an interview with The dutya few hours before the book arrived You will write NO in your forehead on bookstore shelves.
But the woman who is now 38 years old knows well that she has not signed the last chapter of violence within the Canadian Armed Forces, an institution tarnished by numerous sexual scandals. Her observation from 2023 is sharp: despite all the denunciations of sexual assault and misconduct within the army, nothing has changed, she judges.
His story, written by journalist Claudie Côté, is told in this work with a striking title: You will write NO in your forehead. This is the sentence that a superior said to her when she had just denounced the attack. “A warning, that’s what she was given,” reports the author in her introductory remarks to the work. Apparently, “our non-consent is never clear enough”, notes Mme Raymond.
“Stéphanie Raymond’s story is not one of sexual assault, but rather that of a relentless fight against the military machine. A machine that did everything to silence her, without succeeding. Stéphanie became the catalyst for a profound crisis in the Canadian Armed Forces,” continues the author.
The attack that the young 27-year-old soldier experienced on December 15, 2011, however, is the anchor point of this story. She recounts her repeated refusals expressed to her superior, Warrant Officer André Gagnon, her lack of consent, her fear, and her shame. If this part of the story resembles that of many other women, the rest exposes the power play of a powerful institution.
When she accused her superior, he remained in office, but she was fired with reprimand — which echoes all these women who say they are afraid to denounce so as not to harm their career. “It’s so much of our life that we’re destroying by doing this,” notes the young woman, calm and nuanced in the interview.
What followed for her was retaliation, insults and humiliation, we can read in the approximately 280 pages of the work. It is also about the daily harassment that other soldiers subjected her to and all the “prejudices and physical stereotypes” which fall on women, she says, and even more on those who operate in predominantly male environments. , like the army.
Because many people have not been kind to her. “In my time, we called it an annoyance,” writes one under a newspaper article which relates one of the stages of the criminal procedures. “She looks like a porn actress,” writes this other.
Because the criminal proceedings were highly publicized, “people think they know my story. It’s normal. But they only know a third of it! » she said. She found that they often confused her version of events with that of the accused, leading some to say, “She ran after him.” » But by reading the work, “perhaps people will say to themselves: oops, perhaps I judged too quickly”.
A long journey before justice
The book relates all the stages which followed the denunciation of Stéphanie Raymond, and the pitfalls which undermined it, including her disturbing interrogation carried out by the military police. We can read there that military investigators took only two days before deciding that no criminal charges would be brought against Warrant Officer Gagnon. When proceedings were finally brought, they resulted in an acquittal at Court Martial. The adjutant had repeated that the young woman was willing to engage in sexual games since she had agreed to follow him to the Lévis armory and that, subsequently, she “let herself be done”. The criminal case went all the way to the Supreme Court, then it was sent to civil court, where the man finally pleaded guilty.
Mme Raymond never gave up: “I had this hope of seeing the justice system succeed. And then, she admits candidly: I never thought it would be so long. »
She has no regrets. For her, the outcome was positive: Warrant Officer Gagnon admitted his guilt and was sentenced to six months in prison, which allowed him to “clear his reputation”. In addition, the defense of “sincere but erroneous belief” of consent to sexual relations has been defined by the Supreme Court, she adds.
Reforms still awaited
But the army has not yet changed, Stéphanie Raymond maintains in an interview: the reports on sexual misconduct in the army follow one another and are as damning as ever. She talks about the Deschamps report from 2015, and that of former Supreme Court judge Louise Arbour, released just last year. The latter requests the transfer of any file of sexual assault within the army to civilian authorities. She also highlights the need for profound changes in the way the Forces do things.
And then, just yesterday, Mme Raymond says he received messages from soldiers who told him they were experiencing the same thing as her. “Identical, copied and pasted,” she sums up: the attackers suffer no negative consequences for their actions and even obtain promotions.
“It’s so hard to change,” sighs the former soldier. But she believes she has contributed to the winds of change, with the #MeToo movement and the ex-judges’ reports on sexual misconduct in the army.
“All this will leave its mark,” she said, “if the Forces [armées canadiennes] are ready to face each other. »