Academics examining abuse and bullying in the Australian Defence Force say the military "desperately" needs to improve diversity in order to stamp out outdated attitudes and behaviours.
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UNSW Canberra researcher James Connor and Flinders University associate professor Ben Wadham will spend the next three years finding and interviewing people affected by abuse within the military to track how those behaviours have changed over time.
The pair aim to find out why such behaviours manifest within macho environments and what can be done to address the issue, with the hope their findings will inform cultural change within other male-dominated institutions such as the police and churches.
"The military has made great strides in trying to improve itself but we still see pockets of resistance to that change, we still see areas where there's risk of abuse, and indeed we still see examples of bastardisation and assault and hazing and all the things that supposedly are meant to have been stamped out," Dr Connor said.
"By understanding what went wrong in military culture historically, hopefully we can identify what they can fix now to make it better in the future."
Dr Connor said diversity pushes of the last decade had improved cultural issues within the Australian Defence Force but noted a lag in who was being promoted to top roles. Issues also remained with retaining women, particularly those of child bearing age, he said.
"You can only stop it being a boys' club when it's no longer a boys' club," he said.
"[Diversity] looks like a much more representative snapshot of the Australian population in general, but also trying to have an organisation that is not composed of the same sort of people, because we generally get the same type of Australian joining the military at the moment and we have done for the past 119 years."
Fewer than 6 per cent of the ADF's 57,000-strong permanent force identified as coming from a non-English speaking background in 2015, while about 5.4 percent were born overseas in countries other than New Zealand, Britain, Canada and the US.
The federal government launched a campaign targeting potential recruits target potential recruits of Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, Vietnamese, Malaysian and Indigenous backgrounds mid-last year.
Dr Connor and Dr Wadham hope to speak with at least 30 people affected by abuse within the military over the next three years.
Six survivors of abuse were interviewed during the pilot phase of the project. Dr Connor said their accounts, while unique, revealed "interesting commonalities", such as the bystander effect.
"Abuse in military organisations, particularly in training institutions, occurs with other people watching," Dr Connor said.
"The vast majority of people are not engaging in these sorts of activities but they're condoning it by their inaction."
