Getting Social About Her Abuse In The Canadian Forces
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A slighty different version of this was written for my Huffington Post blog
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/stephen-weir/sandra-perron_a_23074869/
By Stephen Weir
I spent the 80s
and early 90s working for a company that designed, built and marketed weapons
and defense systems to the military. I
was often called upon to interact with military leaders at classified trade
shows, product demonstrations and, of course, the never ending plant tours
(The military Dog and Pony shows).
In all my time on
the job I never once helped with a Canadian Forces visit that included a high-ranking
female officer. The
business of buying multi-million dollar defense systems was a Man’s World,
after all, women weren’t allowed to lead troops onto the battlefield (although some NATO allies were more enlightened).
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| Sandra Perronn Toronto park - sweir photo |
I left that world
in 1993, and it wasn’t until last month that I actually met a senior female combat officer
from the Canadian Forces. I was asked to
escort the Gatineau based writer to a TV interview here in Toronto and of
course that meant we got to talk … a lot. Major Sandra Perron is now retired (she left the Army just about when I left Litton
Industries). And, now I understand why, when I was on the defense hardware
beat, Army was a synonym for The Boys Club.
This is Sandra
Perron's story. As Canada's first female infantry officer, a decorated
and highly commended member of the legendary Van Doos and a veteran of
peacekeeping missions in the former Yugoslavia, Perron had much to be proud
of. But, if you read her new autobiography, operating in the Yugoslavian
war zone was a walk in the park compared to being a female officer in
Canada.
She
was raped almost immediately after enlisting. Her brothers-at-arms regularly
hazed her, sometimes violently. You may
remember seeing a 1992 picture of her that was front page news across Canada.
It was secretly taken of her during a Prisoner Of War training exercise – It
was a cold winter, she was tied to a tree, beaten and left for hours in the
snow. Perron said it was all part of her training and was okay with what happened but that photo was seen as a living example of systemic abuse against female
Canadian officers.
Sandra Perron’s
military struggles (and successes) are written about in detail in her new memoir,
Out Standing in the Field. The book was published in April and
early in the New Year will be available in French.
“There were blips of indications that things
were not right, but I accepted them knowing that I was in an environment that
was male dominated and that it was just [a gap] I had to bridge, a road I had
to pave as I went. It never struck me until I left the military that there
were so many things that happened to me that were wrong."
“This story was
painful for me to write, it took me 25 years to work up the courage to tell my
story,” she told me. “That is what took
so long. It took two years to write the manuscript and a good year and a half
before I sent it out to publishing houses. (Watch Sharon Perron talk about how the book came about in this 3 minute YouTube video by George Socka
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"The feedback that
I received was that I was still keeping secrets and that I had to dig deeper
and share more details of my story. That took awhile. I had to sit down and
really revisit a period of my life where there was so much excitement going on
but there was also hardships and obstacles in my career.”
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| On the set of the Social - cell photo sweir |
The book is
resonating. At a taping of the afternoon
talk show The Social, the almost all female audience (I was the only male in the studio) gave the author an almost unheard of on camera standing
ovation!
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Pushing Canada to
change is what it is all about. As she recently said in a Macleans magazine
interview “The military has to evolve. Women are too important to it to not get
this right. They cannot afford to not get this right.”
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