A former soldier who appeared on recruitment posters for the British army has received a settlement and an apology after taking it to an employment tribunal over the racist and sexist abuse she was subjected to during her career.
Knight, 33, thought the army would offer stability, a type of family and the chance of a fantastic career. She had a “bright hope” she could pave the way for other young, Black women.
Now, after 12 years of service, her hopes are in tatters. After enduring more than a decade of racist and sexist abuse, she was forced out of the role she loved.
When Knight appeared on the recruitment poster she thought she had been asked because of her achievements in training. “I didn’t know it was because I was going to be the only Black woman in that regiment,” she told the Guardian. “I didn’t know what I was in for.”
I had to serve alongside people that claimed to support the KKK
Not that I have any respect for American klansmen, but if you’re an ocean away larping as a klansman then you’re just that much more of a dork. They should light up a cross and do us all a favor and throw themselves on it.
Also her skin is crazy good. Practically glows.
She’s gorgeous.
Yeah she’s quite possibly the most attractive Brit I’ve seen. Though that’s not the point here, she’s been through fucking hell and I hope the British military pays for what it did to her
Larpers larping as other larpers, the dork layers run deep…
An MoD spokesperson said: “We do not tolerate abuse, bullying or discrimination of any kind and encourage any personnel who believe they have experienced or witnessed unacceptable behaviour to report it. All allegations of unacceptable behaviour are taken extremely seriously and are thoroughly investigated. If proven, swift action will be taken.
“The MoD settled this claim with Kerry-Ann Knight in June, with no admission of liability.”
“We’ve investigated ourselves, found nothing, done nothing, admitted to nothing, but here’s a nice PR-friendly answer and some money to fuck off.”
Does that recruitment poster seriously try to recruit people by offending them? Is the military stupid?
Apparently.
It looks to be aimed at the type of people who see their own generation as selfish trash, and would be receptive to the “we’re looking for the real ones, join and find your peers” type message that the poster goes for.
But I doubt that lands with a lot of people. That younger generations are lazy, selfish, penny pinchers is not a view held by a lot of the people who actually are of those generations.
Might work if they were recruiting boomers, tho.
It makes sense that that culture attracted the exact type of people who treated this woman like shit.
"But from the outset, she said, she did not feel welcome. In her witness statement she detailed how colleagues “took it in turns to shout out ‘watermelooooon!’ anytime I walked into the room. Every time they did this the others would laugh,” she said, adding that she “felt humiliated and mocked”.
She heard colleagues talking about her “getting lynched” and being “tarred and feathered”. One said he would put her in a “hot box” – a reference to a scene in the film Django Unchained in which a black female slave is tortured by being locked inside a wooden coffin-type box.
In her statement, Knight said the Tarantino film “was regularly played by my colleagues – seemingly on repeat”.
Over several years, Knight tried to raise complaints about the racism and misogyny, informally at first and then formally, through Service Complaints, the grievance scheme for members of the armed forces. She backed up her complaints with evidence, including WhatsApp screenshots and audio recordings.
However, after submitting a service complaint about her treatment at AFC Harrogate she was removed from her role training junior soldiers, on the basis that her “mental or emotional state [was] sufficiently at risk of deterioration that she should not be in a [junior soldier-]facing role at this time”.
“I think when it got to that stage, that’s when I just realised that the army is institutionally racist,” Knight said. “And they would go above and beyond in order to discredit me as an individual, in order to protect the army image, to portray that racism doesn’t exist, even though it was there in black and white.”
What the actual fuck?
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Factual Reporting: Mixed
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