Teen woman soldier claims she was gang-raped for ‘hours’ by fellow troops at Army faculty

She is among four women to claim they were sexually assaulted and harassed aged 17 at the residential centre which they say had a dangerous culture of misogyny and sexual violence

A teen girl soldier has said she was gang-raped for ‘hours’ by fellow troops inside an Army Foundation College.

She was among four young women to tell the BBC they were sexually assaulted and harassed at the residential centre when they were 17.

The alleged victims said the college in Harrogate, North Yorks, had a dangerous culture of misogyny and sexual violence.

North Yorkshire Police has received 16 reports of sex crimes linked to the college in the past year including indecent exposure, voyeurism and sexual assault, according to a Freedom of Information request.

No information was released on whether anyone was prosecuted.

A total of 176 complaints of inappropriate sexual behaviour were made between 2018 and 2025, according to the Ministry of Defence.

Of those 32 were against staff and 144 junior soldiers.

An Army spokesman said the reports were ‘extremely distressing and serious’.

“Unacceptable and criminal behaviour has absolutely no place in our Armed Forces,” they went on.

“People join in the hope of having a fantastic career and any such reports are unacceptable and go completely against everything the Army stands for.”

The college is the largest military training base for under-19s in the UK and receives all the Army’s 16-year-old recruits.

There are currently 70 female junior soldiers out of 889.

One victim, who said she had signed up because she ‘admired women in non-traditional roles’ and loved ‘action films’, said she was targeted by multiple male soldiers.

“They were like ‘do you want to come into the room?’. And me being a naive 17-year-old girl was like ‘yeah fine’,” she said.

“They started taking my clothes off and then this led to them doing stuff I didn’t consent to. There were a lot of them.

“They touched me in places, made inappropriate comments, calling me a thing rather than a girl.

“And then I was raped by multiple junior soldiers – same age as me.

“It went on for hours. I felt like a piece of meat.”

The girl said she left the Army two weeks later, adding: “I couldn’t be in there.”

She reported the attack to police but no charges were brought partly because of what the Crown Prosecution Service later described as an ‘entirely inadequate’ investigation.

The woman received a financial settlement from North Yorkshire Police with no admission of liability by the force.

Another woman said a fellow soldier attacked her after trapping her in a college room.

“He stood against the door so I couldn’t get out,” she said.

“He then pushed himself up against me, started kissing my face and touching me all over. He sexually assaulted me.

“I managed to push him off. I’m not sure how because he’s really strong.”

She received an unrelated medical discharge.

A mum told the Beeb her daughter had suffered almost daily sex harassment during her training before she too was sexually assaulted.

“She found herself sleeping across the door to stop male soldiers coming in,” the mum said.

A fourth woman said she too was targeted sexually after hearing one of the instructors telling male recruits: “It’s all about the pussy and how much of it you can get.” Instructors marked girls’ looks out of 10, she said, and would ‘walk into our dorms without knocking and we’d be standing there just in our knickers – they would just stare’.

Several adult instructors at the collage have been convicted by courts martial of physical and sexual violence.

In 2023 Corporal Daniel Conway was jailed for more than seven years for raping a colleague while she was sleeping.

Corporal Simon Bartram was found guilty of sexual assault and sentenced to 20 months in military jail that same year.

None of the new allegations relate to these instructors.

Labour MP Emma Lewell, who sits on the Defence Committee, said: “If this was anywhere else it would have been closed down by now or someone would have been in there looking in-depth at what is going on.

“As a matter of urgency there should be an independent inquiry into the college led by someone with significant safeguarding experience and they need to be able to speak to the children there.”

Military top brass said reforms had been introduced to support victims.

A college visit by the children’s commissioner’s office and safeguarding authorities in January this year had recognised ‘the culture of care and the confidence junior soldiers have in raising concerns’.

The college’s ‘robust discipline system’ has been graded ‘outstanding’ by the schools’ inspectorate Ofsted which visits every three years, they added.