Posted on 06/22/2016 9:22:01 AM PDT by RummyChick
Gruesome details about Australias military were revealed after a public inquiry on child sex abuse discovered how recruits were forced to rape one another as part of a sick initiation practice. The abuse went unnoticed for decades.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse has received no fewer than 111 reports of incidents of sexual abuse carried out against navy cadets as young as 15 in the 1960s right through to the 1980s.
The harrowing ordeals involved instructions to rape each other, as well as carry out other, equally brutal attacks. Two institutions accounted for over 50 cases out of the 111 the HMAS Leeuwin, in Western Australia, and an army apprentice school at Balcombe, Victoria.
obama probably will order his Secretary of Defense to implement this at our military academies.
Military schools for intermediate and high school grades.
British penal colony gone bad.
An old Royal Naval tradition that Australia inherited - boys were taken in for training as officers at 13 until the late 1950s. The age was raised to 16 until the late 1970s - I started at 16 myself in 1972 (I experienced and saw no sign of this abuse, although I do not doubt there were cases where it happened, I believe it was very rare). There were also Junior Recruits who were taken for training at 15 until quite recently - they trained to be sailors, not officers.
Even today you can join at 17, although you will not be deployed overseas until you are 18.
Why is this way? Partly it was tradition, but it also reflected our school systems in Australia. It used to be normal here - until the 1980s - for students to finish school at 15 and go to work. You only stayed on for the last two years of secondary school if there was a specific reason you needed to - most commonly because you were aiming at a white colour job or planned to go to university. And even now, a lot of students will still be 17 when they finish secondary schooling - kids on a normal education track start turning 18 in the second half of their final school year - if they couldn't move on to their future plans until they turned 18, we'd have kids who finished school and wanted to join the Defence Forces who would have potentially have to wait six months or more for their eighteenth birthday.
Apologies for replying to this old thread - for some reason it just appeared near the top of the Australian topic at FR and I didn’t notice how old it was.
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