Military trauma can arise from institutional culture, abuse, failed accountability and harmful experiences across service, regardless of whether a person deploys. Research presented to the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide broadened the understanding of service-related harm, placing greater responsibility on Defence and government to address structural risks, strengthen oversight and prevent injury before personnel reach crisis.
Military trauma is often understood through exposure to combat, deployment and the psychological consequences of war. Professor Ben Wadham’s research places another source of harm within that picture. His work shows how military structures, relationships and cultural practices can cause lasting injury during service, including among personnel who have never deployed.
When personal trauma became a research question
Wadham’s understanding of institutional harm began with his own experience in the Australian Army. While serving as a corporal, he was ambushed, abducted and assaulted by five fellow soldiers. The attack left him with significant trauma, although he only recognised its effects gradually as his wellbeing deteriorated.
He eventually left the Army and spent the following decade deeply estranged from military institutions. During that period, he continued watching Defence and making submissions to inquiries into cultural reform. The connection reflected the difficulty of separating an individual experience from the organisation in which it occurred, particularly when the processes intended to provide accountability offered little resolution.
“I was embittered with the military for about ten years, but I always had one eye on what was happening,” Wadham says. “I kept contributing to inquiries because the experience raised questions about the institution, the culture and the way these cases were handled.”
His academic path initially took him into research on race relations in Australia, with a focus on identity, conformity and the treatment of difference. Those themes eventually brought him back to the military. Armed forces depend on conformity, cohesion and a clear chain of command, yet those same characteristics can create conditions in which difference is punished, power is misused and loyalty to the group takes precedence over accountability.
Building a record that could not be forgotten
After completing his PhD, Wadham began researching military justice reform in 2003. Cases involving bullying, physical violence, sexual assault and other forms of abuse soon became central to his work. His personal experience helped him recognise patterns across those accounts, while his academic training let him examine how organisational structures shaped them.
The work also became a form of research activism. Wadham wanted to create an evidence base that could support reform and preserve a historical record of abuse. Without that continuity, each public scandal could be treated as a newly discovered problem, separated from the inquiries and recommendations that preceded it.
“The same cycle keeps occurring,” he says. “An incident becomes public, it develops into a scandal, an inquiry produces recommendations, and those recommendations enter a policy graveyard. Research gives us a record that connects each event to the larger history.”
For years, Defence resisted external scrutiny of these issues, and Wadham found himself excluded from parts of the military and research establishment. A major Defence scandal in 2011 expanded public awareness of abuse and led to seven reviews, the establishment of the Defence Abuse Response Taskforce and renewed calls for a royal commission. By then, Wadham had already developed a substantial body of research documenting the institutional dimensions of military abuse.
Shifting the Royal Commission’s focus
His contribution became especially significant during the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide. Wadham and his colleagues at Open Door, Flinders University’s research hub for service personnel, veterans and their families, made a submission and gave evidence on the first day of public hearings. Their testimony broadened the Commission’s early focus on mental health, deployment trauma and individual vulnerability.
“We argued that the institution itself harms people,” Wadham says. “War carries costs, but service also carries costs because of the way the institution operates. It is hierarchical, based on command and control, masculinised, fraternal and exceptionalist. Those characteristics shape how people are treated and how harm is managed.”
How military culture protects institutional harm
Exceptionalism plays a particularly important role in sustaining harmful practices. Military service involves responsibilities and conditions that differ from most civilian employment, but the belief that outsiders cannot understand military life can also place the institution beyond effective scrutiny. Problems are managed internally, personnel are discouraged from challenging authority, and reporting misconduct can be interpreted as disloyalty to the unit.
This culture supports what Wadham describes as a code of silence and a strong preference to ‘keep it in house’. Fraternity and loyalty can provide belonging and mutual protection, while also shielding perpetrators and discouraging members from reporting abuse. Within a rigid hierarchy, the personal and professional consequences of speaking up can be considerable.
Abuse in this environment extends beyond the actions of an individual perpetrator. Command responses, investigative processes, career consequences and the treatment of complainants can deepen the original injury. When an institution controls a member’s employment, identity, social relationships and access to justice, its response becomes part of the harm.
Wadham’s research describes military violence and abuse as an enduring institutional disposition. Practices such as bullying, hazing, humiliation and exclusion can reinforce hierarchy and discipline members who are perceived as weak, different or unwilling to observe the code of silence. The same behaviours can then be framed as isolated misconduct, leaving the systems that enabled them largely untouched.
Following his initial testimony, the Royal Commission commissioned Wadham and his colleagues to produce Mapping Service and Transition to Self-Harm and Suicidality. Drawing on 113 interviews, the report examined the connections between institutional experiences, transition, self-harm and suicide. Counsel assisting the Commission later described it as a seminal paper and urged Defence, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and the Defence Strategic Review to engage with its findings.
The Royal Commission’s final position reflected the broader understanding that Wadham and other witnesses had brought into its work. Suicide and suicidality were connected to experiences across the service life course, including abuse, military justice processes, involuntary separation, institutional betrayal and failures of leadership. Deployment remained one part of a much larger system of risk.
Decades of inquiry without structural reform
The history of military reform shows how consistently these concerns have been identified. The Royal Commission examined 57 inquiries conducted since 1995. Wadham’s research identified 35 inquiries into military cultural reform dating back to 1970, along with hundreds of recommendations across mental health and related areas. Despite this extensive record, familiar patterns continue to appear in accounts from serving and former personnel.
For Wadham, repeated inquiries have produced administrative and procedural responses while leaving many structural drivers intact. Policies may be revised, reporting pathways adjusted and oversight arrangements renamed, yet hierarchy, exceptionalism, institutional secrecy and the distribution of power continue to influence how those measures operate.
“The recommendations are usually dealt with as procedural or administrative matters, which is why the underlying problems continue,” he says. “After decades of inquiries, the task is to examine the institution structurally and culturally and change the levers that keep producing harm.”
Moving accountability beyond policy and procedure
That requires greater transparency about reform, including clear evidence of which recommendations have been implemented and how their effects are being measured. Wadham’s current work includes tracking the Royal Commission’s 122 recommendations through an independent report card. The Australian Government accepted 121 fully or in principle, but public claims about implementation remain difficult to verify against accessible evidence.
Wadham is also bringing this focus to the Defence and Veterans’ Service Commission, established in response to the Royal Commission’s final recommendation. Effective oversight will depend on its capacity to examine outcomes across Defence and veteran systems, maintain public visibility over implementation and identify when procedural activity has failed to produce institutional change.
Preventing harm before people reach crisis
His work through Open Door combines this accountability agenda with a social and preventive approach to veteran wellbeing. Research into institutional harm explains how people are injured, while preventive health, education, employment, housing, family support and community connection provide pathways towards recovery. Together, these areas shift the response upstream by addressing the conditions that influence wellbeing before people reach crisis.
Reframing military trauma through an institutional lens also changes where responsibility sits. Clinical care remains essential for people experiencing psychological injury, but treatment begins after harm has occurred. Prevention requires Defence and government to examine how service is organised, how authority is exercised, how complaints are handled and whether personnel can challenge misconduct without sacrificing their careers or belonging.
Wadham’s experience connects these questions across several decades. An assault by fellow soldiers became the beginning of a research career examining why military institutions repeatedly produce and conceal harm. The Royal Commission brought that evidence into a national inquiry and adopted a wider understanding of the relationship between service and suicide. The next phase will be determined by whether reform reaches the institutional structures that the evidence has identified.
