The Women of Honour meanwhile say that, having found their voice, they are not going away.

I was listening to RTÉ’s radio documentary, Women of Honour. It was 2021. I had been researching whistleblowing for almost fifteen years. But this was something new.

During the hour-long show, Katie Hannon interviewed former female officers in the Irish army, navy and air corps about their experiences of sexual assault and harassment at work. About how their reports had been ignored by higher-ups, again and again. 

Hannon gave the backgrounds to their stories of “promotions unfairly denied, of careers interrupted by discrimination, of unfair treatment after maternity leave”. “A common theme,” she noted, “is the feeling of being victimised for complaining. 

And there are darker tales too: accounts of bullying, sexual harassment and sexual assault.  And the depression, bulimia, self-harm and suicide attempts that followed.” The show was a damning account of abuse within a culture that did not accept or listen to women.

Their experiences of isolation and exclusion were depressingly familiar. But something different seemed to be happening in this case, prompting my research article in Gender, Work and Organization.

Seeking justice for what they had endured, a collective of women had organized themselves, meeting secretly online. They called the group Women of Honour. Women of Honour represent themselves as a single entity. They speak in public as though they are one. This makes their experiences as whistleblowers stand out in three ways: the support, the shield, and the loudspeaker.

The Support

“They worry about who they can trust,” Hannon was telling her listeners.  “So, they have kept the existence of this group secret, even from friends and former colleagues.”

The group grew, as more and more people discovered that others had had similar experiences of abuse. Making connections was not easy. As one woman described, serving women can find themselves excluded if they speak out, “the nature of [the organization] is to keep people apart.  So, it’s not that you could just come together as a group. Because you didn’t know other people were suffering.”

She talked about how it was only recently she realized that other women who, ‘I knew through my career, that I thought had a glorious career and … the “golden girls”, you know, were actually struggling hugely. But we just all kept it to ourselves because that was the nature of it.  The support wasn’t there. We were not allowed to be vulnerable like that.”

In these covert, online meetings, stories were shared. After agreeing that the Women of Honour would work with Katie Hannon to go public through her documentary, she was invited in for research. “There is a huge sense of camaraderie at these meetings,” she noted, “The relief of being able to speak openly about incidents that blighted all their careers is palpable.” 

Hannon’s documentary describes how this sense of mutual support extended to military #MeToo movements in Australia, the UK and the US. The programme opens with an audio scene. Someone shares a group chat message with the rest of the women. 

‘Oh my God, ladies, oh my God.  Please play back the World News on RTÉ 1, [at 8 o‘clock]…Three minutes of hardcore reason why we need to keep going.  The Canadian army is in bits and ironically, their Operation Honour, has not worked.  

Just an unbelievable statement for three minutes.  Sorry, I can’t type because I’m on the way to go for a swim ….  Will tell you all about it later.  So excited, it’s just unbelievable.’

[Message alert sound] Wow, that is something else.  Is there a link we can access that?

[Message alert sound] Excited to hear more, Karina, travel safe.

[Message alert sound] Wow, Karina, the similarities are unbelievable.

The World News had featured emerging evidence from Canada’s Military #MeToo movement, uncovering a ‘hostile, sexualised and hypermasculine culture’, in which the Canadian ‘military justice system revictimizes women’.

Despite being miles away, the sense of empathy and equivalence with overseas serving women was powerful. The groups shared the military MeToo hashtag.

The Shield

‘Defence Forces representatives are refusing to co-operate with an external oversight body set up to transform military culture in the aftermath of the Women of Honour allegations’ wrote the Irish Times’ Conor Gallagher earlier this year. Just one example of how this collective name has stuck.

When I first heard the radio broadcast, I assumed journalists would not go along with this unusual label. I recalled hosting investigative reporters at a University of Galway webinar; the topic was working with whistleblowers. You need the individual name, I was told. To be impactful, a whistleblowing story needs a real person at its heart, with a face, and a family. This is, of course, a double-edged sword. Being named in public is one of the quickest ways to accelerate painful reprisals from colleagues, managers and even potential employers. Whistleblowers can become a target, as the spotlight turns on the wrongdoing organization, and their unmasking plays a big part.

Not this time. Being able to speak from within a collective seems to have offered the Women of Honour a shield from individualized reprisals.

It also offers a shield from publicly disclosing that most painful and personal kind of wrongdoing: sexual violence, discrimination and harassment. Such disclosures can be treated with disdain by organizations, ‘not real whistleblowing’, and stigmatized by media, making the experience almost impossible for the person coming forward as Zelda Perkins described when I interviewed her in 2024, about being one of the first and most impactful whistleblowers in the case against Harvey Weinstein. 

This is why the choice of a collective, singular name like Women of Honour was all the more powerful. When the group went public, no woman was named alone. This meant two things: no-one was singled out for special attention in the media, thus spared the spotlight that is so stressful for whistleblowers and their families. And no-one could be scapegoated and targeted by the organization if it wished to retaliate.

The Loudspeaker

I believe this is a turning point… The [Women of Honour] have been heard. By the Minister for Defence, Simon Coveney and the Secretary General of the Department of Defence, Jacqui McCrum. Both figures had ‘apologised – without hesitation- for the appalling experiences outlined…’

Senator Tom Clonan was writing about the collective’s current situation. Clonan had borne the brunt of reprisal, whistleblowing about similar issues in the same Defence Force organization some twenty years earlier, and to some degree ever since. The collective Women of Honour tag, he noted, seems to amplify and give weight to the disclosures.

Collectivizing for the sake of amplifying might be something arising from basic necessity. Whether via the Everyday Sexism project or the various manifestations of #MeToo, ‘platform feminism’ has emerged to share and spotlight experiences of harm, where it is otherwise ignored or covered-over. As Professors Sheena Vachhani and Alison Pullen describe, platform feminisms are informal structures for anonymous sharing and ‘therefore, through disguise, [they] are an enabler of resistance’.

Of course, it is foolish to imagine there are no tensions emerging within the group. It is not easy to organize amid stressful circumstances, in the public eye, and against such powerful employers. It would be naïve to think it is all straightforward.

And justice is still a while away. This summer the inquiry began. Whether it will attract witnesses and supporters, and whether its scope is sufficient remains under discussion. And current serving Defence Force personnel still come forward to disclose abuses at work.

Even so, there are lessons here for all kinds of disclosures of wrongdoing. Long-standing whistleblowing experts point to the importance of collectives.

What the Women of Honour have shown us is that collective whistleblowing movements enable support, act as shields, and grant a loudspeaker to otherwise isolated people. They allow them to mobilize for justice -- not easily -- but in a safer way.

Kate Kenny, October 2024

More information:

Watch: Tom Clonan and Kate Kenny discuss the impacts of the Women of Honour's campaign.

Listen: Katie Hannon's documentary on RTE Radio, Women of Honour

Read: Peer-review article at Gender, Work and Organization, 'Feminist social movements and whistleblowing disclosures: Ireland's Women of Honour'