How Paraphilic British Militarism Victimises Boys

This is a deep-dive long-form investigation into the military subculture of sexual sadism in the British army. It suggests a deep-rooted violence at the heart of the British state where these forms of depravity flourishes. Warning, contains disturbing and graphic content. 

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, if you were a teenage boy who ran away from home or was sleeping rough, and you ended up at King’s Cross or Euston station in London at night, there was a good chance that you would be approached by a man in a military uniform named Roger Gleaves. Gleaves would offer you a place to stay, a warm bed, and food. If you accepted his offer, he would take you to one of his hostels for boys in London, which were funded by government departments and local councils. There, Gleaves would dress you in a military uniform and expect you to behave in a military fashion. He would also subject you to rape and sexual abuse. Gleaves was able to violently abuse teenage boys in his London hostels over a number of years, and the state helped him run these hostels, despite already having a criminal record by that point for sexually abusing a boy while in the military; Gleaves was an Army Cadet Corps Instructor in the 1950s, and was jailed in 1959 for three years for sexually abusing a boy who was an Army Cadet in his care. Nonetheless, he was able to set up a network of hostels for homeless teenage boys in London upon his release, and the government and local councils funded him to do so. As Norman Fowler, MP for Sutton Coldfield in 1975, pointed out after Gleaves’s conviction for his crimes that year: “Gleaves had a criminal record in the very area in which he was working, yet substantial public funds were allocated to him”. There are parallels here with the case of Neville Husband – who also served in the British Army, before becoming a prison officer at various junior male detention centres. Husband was arrested at Portland Borstal in 1969 for importing child pornography that included sadomasochistic images involving teenage boys. Husband admitted showing the images to the boys in his care, but claimed that he was doing so as part of research for a book that he was writing on homosexuality. The police and prison service accepted his claim, and in 1970, he was transferred to Medomsley Detention Centre in County Durham*, where he systematically sexually abused boys over the course of fifteen years. The sexual abuse involved acts of torture. He was allowed to work at Medomsley – which was a Home Office-run detention centre for teenage boys – despite the details of his arrest in 1969 being written on the top of his employment record; which is similar to how Gleaves was convicted of sexually abusing a boy, yet the government later helped him access vulnerable boys, whom he abused. In both cases, Gleaves and Husband used their military background to aid in their abuse; Gleaves wore a military uniform and forced the boys he abused to dress in military uniforms and behave in a military fashion, and Husband threatened his victims that he had been in the British Army and was trained to kill. Husband was given a 10-year prison sentence in 2005 for abusing boys while at Medomsley.

Medomsley was mostly staffed by ex-soldiers and was run on military lines. The majority of the boys there were ‘white working-class’, and were there for minor first-time offences, which nowadays would not even get a custodial sentence. The brutality there escalated under Margaret Thatcher’s ‘short, sharp shock’ policy, which instituted military regimes in male borstals, to punish boys whom Thatcher labelled “violent young thugs”. The staff used torture techniques against the boys there that the British Army also used against young male detainees in the post-WWII era in places such as Cyprus, Aden, and Northern Ireland – including stress positions; forced nudity; hitting/squeezing of genitals; beatings; burnings; sensory, sleep, and food deprivation; forced gratuitous exercise; suffocation; and rape. Many of these techniques were later used by the British Army against young male detainees during the occupation of Iraq in 2003. Another Medomsley staff member who was convicted in 2019 of abusing boys there in the 1970s/80s was British Army veteran and PE instructor, Christopher Onslow.

One victim described him as “a bit like a sergeant major in the army, but with extreme violence” – he was known for routinely kicking boys in the genitals and lifting them up by their nipples. The ex-military staff at Medomsley tortured a boy there by stripping him and rubbing pepper into his genitals – which is the exact same thing that a teenage Cypriot boy described being subjected to by British soldiers during the Cyprus Emergency in the 1950s. BBC footage from 1985 shows boys at Medomsley being forced to partake in military-style marching on the parade square. One victim described how when the boys were screamed at and forced into stress positions on the parade square, passersby would walk their dogs on the other side of the fence, see what was happening, and continue walking as if nothing was wrong. As with Gleaves – who was witnessed at King’s Cross and Euston station approaching lone boys in his military uniform, and was permitted to continue unabated without arousing suspicion – these ex-soldiers were afforded status and respect; Neville Husband, for example, was prestigious in Durham (he belonged to a local Church, drama group, and Masonic lodge), and Durham police refused to believe abuse stories from released boys – threatening to return them to Medomsley if they continued to complain. The Truth Project, part of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, notes that at other similarly abusive detention centres for teenage boys at the time, “Some perpetrators were long-serving ex-servicemen and well respected in the local community. These individuals were mostly correctional staff, but also included governors and other support staff in the custodial institution”, and further states that “One participant describes how these [ex-military] perpetrators wore a “mask of respectability” [Truth Project participant abused in custodial institution], all the while seriously abusing the children in their care”.

The Medomsley victim who described how members of the public witnessed boys being abused on the parade square and did not react, also provided an insight into the motivations of the ex-soldiers who ran the detention centre: “I do believe for them to do what they done, it’s happened to them. Maybe was when they were in the Forces, or they’ve witnessed it, or… For them to carry on”. There is certainly evidence of such abusive treatment perpetrated against soldiers in the armed forces by their superiors – in 2004, an ex-RAF Warrant Officer named Leslie Skinner was jailed for sexually abusing the 17 to 19-year-old male recruits who he was responsible for training at Deepcut Barracks in the 1990s; he subjected the young male recruits in his care to sadomasochistic sexual assaults involving whips and canes. The military transferred Skinner to Deepcut Barracks in order for him to train young male recruits there, after he had just been convicted of exposing himself to a 17-year-old boy in a car park; which again illustrates how a state institution knew that an individual drawn from the military had a sexual interest in boys, and yet gave that individual access to boys, resulting inevitably in further cases of sexual abuse. The young male recruits whom Skinner was abusing did not speak up for years because they knew Skinner was “rank” – i.e. high up in the chain of command – and the military taught them to do “what you are told”.

This militaristic subculture of sexual sadism towards boys is not confined to male perpetrators; the International Criminal Court has confirmed that in 2003, Britain’s Royal Regiment of Fusiliers subjected at least seven Iraqi male victims – including a 13-year-old boy and a 17-year-old boy – to “severe beatings, stress positions, and sexual violence” at Camp Breadbasket, on the outskirts of Basra. This time around, female soldiers played a central role alongside male soldiers in sexually abusing the boys and young men – the abuse was photographed by the perpetrators, and the Army Prosecuting Authority described it as “an exercise in fun”. One of the Iraqi victims stated that the soldiers “were obviously having great pleasure in our suffering”, while the 13-year-old victim stated that “They were enjoying humiliating and abusing us”. Similarly, one man who was held at Medomsley as a teenage boy confirmed that while he was being sexually abused there by ex-soldiers, whilst he was restrained and blindfolded, he could hear the voice of a woman in the room who was watching the abuse for her own enjoyment – potentially the wife of one of the officers. Another man detailed how when he was held at Medomsley as a teenage boy, Neville Husband would take him off the premises to be raped by another man, and a woman would watch that abuse as well for her own enjoyment. Thus, we are talking about a paraphilia that targets boys, is rooted in the military, and is exhibited in both male and female abusers.

Understanding Where This Darkness Comes From

What explains this violent sexual fetishisation of boys, fostered within parts of the military? The question as to why these abuses occurred has been asked by victims themselves, with one Medomsley victim speculating that the staff there were “Devil worshippers”; which illustrates both how extreme the abuse was, and the desire of this victim to find an explanation for it. It is thus important to get to the truth of why such horrors happened. In terms of sexual victimisation of boys by men in the military, I believe this can be explained by a number of factors. I want to make clear at the outset that none of the discussion that follows should be read as demonising gay people, who have historically been subjected to terrible and unjust discrimination, including within the military itself. Rather, this discussion is of a particular phenomenon within parts of the military that is characterised above all by a specific form of sexual sadism – not by homosexuality per se. This is illustrated, for example, by the fact that both Neville Husband and Christopher Onslow were married with children; Husband was known by other prison officers for his heterosexual banter, and he kept copies of ‘Hustler’ and ‘Parade’ magazines in a private drawer there (pornographic magazines aimed at men, exclusively featuring female models). First of all, the military can be a particular kind of homoerotic environment – which, as discussed, is not perpetuated solely or even primarily by self-identified homosexuals. Scottish serial killer Dennis Nilsen, who sexually assaulted and murdered men and boys, wrote about how his aggressive sexual impulses towards men and boys were first awakened when he joined the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers in the 1960s; it was there that, being surrounded constantly by other male recruits in an intimate setting, for prolonged periods of time and accompanied by alcohol, nudity, physical exertion, and violence, he experienced this sexual awakening. When his regiment was deployed to what later became the United Arab Emirates in 1968, he wrote about how officers in his regiment sexually exploited teenage Arab boys, who were impoverished; the British officers would pay these underage boys for sex. Nilsen raped a 14-year-old Arab boy in this context, which was his first sexual encounter. The military is also an environment where older men exercise harsh discipline over younger male recruits – up until as late as 2016 through a widespread punishment in the military known as ‘beasting’, which involved subjecting recruits to very strenuous and protracted physical exercise as a punishment for minor infractions, accompanied by verbal berating and shouting. A 22-year-old recruit in the Royal Welsh Regiment, Gavin Williams, died from heat illness as a result of being beasted at Lucknow Barracks in 2006, as punishment for spraying a fire extinguisher in the barracks as a prank; an officer demanded that Williams be brought to him “hot and sweaty”, which again illustrates what could be seen as homoerotic undertones in harsh military discipline. The military has often been an abusive environment, replete with torture and bullying within the ranks; and the UK allows 16 and 17-year-olds to join the military, the majority of whom have always been boys. These younger recruits have often been the targets for torture and bullying by older recruits. With these factors combined, it is not difficult to see how sexual sadism towards boys, from men, could be cultivated within parts of the military.

A feature that stands out from these cases where male British soldiers and ex-soldiers have sexually victimised boys is the use of violence against boys’ genitals. Alongside the cases at Medomsley where boys had their genitals kicked, squeezed, and rubbed with pepper, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse confirmed that at other similar British detention centres for teenage boys at the time, which “were run as military-like regimes where most of the staff were male and many were ex-service members”, boys also experienced “having their testicles squeezed”. Amnesty International documented in 1966 how British soldiers were subjecting male detainees in Aden to various forms of torture, including “Hitting and twisting their genital organs”, and noted that “young school boys have been interrogated and detained in the same way as elder prisoners”. In 2004, during the occupation of Iraq, a British soldier in the Light Infantry videotaped other soldiers in his regiment pinning down a 14-year-old Iraqi boy and kicking him so hard in the genitals that he urinated on himself and nearly lost consciousness. The soldiers also brutally beat a 12-year-old Iraqi boy alongside the 14-year-old, while the soldier filming laughed and sadistically encouraged his colleagues to punish these “naughty little boys”. Achille Mbembe has written about how “the phallus has been the focus of ways of constructing masculinity and power”, and “Male domination derives in large measure from the power and spectacle of the phallus – not so much from the threat to life during war as from the individual male’s ability to demonstrate his virility at the expense of a woman”.

In this way, Mbembe characterises European colonial domination of Africa as “phallic”, and notes that “colonial violence is… a phallic and sometimes sadistic gesture, insofar as the colonizer thinks and expresses himself through his phallus”, including through raping native women and girls. With the phallus as a symbol and expression of power in the colonial context – which the British Army is historically steeped in – attacking the phallus can be seen as a way of emasculating and disempowering a victim, and establishing dominance by the perpetrator over the man or boy, through attacking his perceived source of masculine power. This is how the men in the British Army distinguish themselves from the men and boys whom they are victimising; the former are masculinised, whereas the latter are emasculated. This also helps to explain why British soldiers castrated Kenyan men during the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s, and why castration often accompanied lynchings of black males in the Jim Crow US South – it was seen as a way of ‘cutting off’ the male victim’s source of pride and power.

The central element of the cases where women have abused boys in the military-linked context that I have been discussing seems to be spectation – watching a boy being tormented as a source of pleasure for the spectator, and to intensify the boy’s humiliation. In the 2003 Camp Breadbasket case in Iraq, female soldiers played a central role alongside male soldiers in sexually abusing the Iraqi boys at the camp; the abuse involved photographing the boys naked in sexually degrading positions, and the female soldiers furthermore subjected the boys to sexual taunts while forcing them to maintain these sexual poses. In the aforementioned cases from Medomsley, women (or it could have been one woman) watched as boys were sexually abused and raped by ex-soldiers, for the pleasure of the female spectator. This seems to be something of an inversion of the ‘male gaze’ – wherein men enjoy observing women as sexual objects, and women are thus presented in a way that satisfies men sexually, with a clear power dynamic that provides males with agency and strips it away from females. In these cases, however, women derive pleasure from watching as boys are stripped naked, rendered powerless and vulnerable, and sexually degraded. Laura Mulvey has analysed the ‘male gaze’, omnipresent in culture, thus: 

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Women displayed as sexual object is the leit-motiff of erotic spectacle; from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfield to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire”. 

The cases that I am discussing represent an inversion of this standard logic; the woman’s gaze is the centre of agency and control, with boys reduced to the status of objects in order to satisfy that gaze. Thus, at Camp Breadbasket, women became pornographers, snapping pictures as boys were forced to simulate sexual acts for the women’s entertainment, immortalised in digital ink. In the case of Medomsley, either one woman or multiple women attended what amounted to perverse peep shows, where boys were sexually abused for the watching woman’s gratification. Mulvey discusses how the ‘male gaze’ has been sometimes presented in film through a female becoming a “passive counterpart” to a male’s “sadistic voyeurism” – this sadistic impulse has sometimes been catered to in film through portrayals of rebellious women being punished sexually, in a way that panders to male viewers. In a similar way, the Iraqi boys at Camp Breadbasket were detained there by the British Army because they were looting food supplies at the camp; and the British boys at Medomsley were detained there because they were guilty of similar minor offences born from poverty, such as stealing biscuits or joyriding. In both cases, the sexual abuse of boys had a strong punitive aspect, further reinforcing the inversion of the typical male-on-female “sadistic voyeurism” that Mulvey describes. Perhaps the female perpetrators in these cases wanted to experience being on ‘the other side’ of the lens, so to speak; a chance to project their own dark fantasies onto a subjugated and vulnerable male object. This becomes particularly plausible in the Camp Breadbasket case when one considers the high level of sexual harassment and assault of female soldiers in the British Army; as with what one Medomsley victim speculated with regards to the motivations of the ex-soldiers at the detention centre, such abuse may have been an opportunity for former victims to become sadistic victimisers. In spite of the military’s misogyny, the women in these cases joined forces with men in the institution to abuse boys, in the knowledge that they were higher in the pecking order than those boys. Some of these perpetrators – men and women – were parents themselves, yet managed to put the boys whom they abused in a separate category from their own children.

One man who was held at Medomsley as a 17-year-old boy – where he was raped, fondled while being choked, and forced into naked stress positions – described the impact that the experience had on him as follows: “It’s ruined my life. Completely ruined it. It’s always in my head – the shame”. Another man who was held at Medomsley as a 16-year-old boy – where Neville Husband routinely sexually assaulted him – stated the following: “It’s the most horrendous chapter of my life. And it happened so early on in my life that it’s just about affected everything I’ve tried to do since”. The 13-year-old Iraqi boy who was sexually humiliated at Camp Breadbasket described the psychological impact of his experience: “I have never felt so ashamed and degraded in all of my life. I was just a child and could not believe what was happening to me”, and he stated: “It is very difficult for me to talk about this, even with my solicitor”.

It is worth bearing in mind that not a single soldier was prosecuted for the sexual crimes against underage boys at Camp Breadbasket, despite the Ministry of Defence paying compensation to the victims; and one Medomsley victim pointed out with regards to the handful of staff members at Medomsley who were eventually convicted of abuse for what they did to boys there: “It wasn’t, like, abuse, it was torture. These prison officers were wrongly charged, it was torture”. Another Medomsley victim stated: “This is some of the worst abuse – I had done to me and everyone else – the worst abuse I’ve seen in my life; now I didn’t know human beings could treat young boys like this”.

Jack Straw – Tony Blair’s Minister of Justice, who authorised the financing of an extraordinary rendition (kidnap-and-torture) operation during the War on Terror – refused to issue an apology to the Medomsley victims on behalf of the Ministry of Justice for what they endured there. As the British state now facilitates an extermination campaign against the people of Gaza, it is clear what dehumanisation can lead to – depraved crimes, sadism, and unconscionable cruelty; and the barbarism that the British state metes out abroad can easily be turned against dehumanised segments of the population at home. Thus, the ‘white working-class’ boys at Medomsley were in the same subhuman category – constructed by the militaristic British state – as the racialised boys in Iraq and Aden. Neville Husband informed one of the boys whom he enjoyed asphyxiating and raping at Medomsley: “you’re just scum”; in the margins of society – global and domestic society – and in the margins of public consciousness and conscience, those who are deemed worthless suffer immensely, and those who wish to inflict suffering to satisfy their own perversions find the perfect prey.

*The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman is currently investigating what the authorities knew at the time about the abuse at Medomsley, and how the abuse was able to go on for so long.