Warning: This article contains sexual language and details of sexual assault

Four young women have told the BBC they were sexually assaulted and harassed at an army training college for teenagers – with one saying she was raped by several fellow junior soldiers in an attack that lasted hours.

The women all attended the Army Foundation College (AFC) at Harrogate, North Yorkshire, over the past five years and say the incidents happened when they were aged 17.

The college has a dangerous culture of misogyny and sexual violence, say the women, who are all speaking out for the first time.

These reports are “extremely distressing and serious”, said an Army spokesperson in a statement.

The BBC can also reveal that North Yorkshire Police received 16 reports of sexual offences linked to the college in the year to June, according to a Freedom of Information request.

Those reported offences include allegations of exposure, voyeurism and sexual assault. No information was provided as to whether they had led to prosecutions.

A total of 176 complaints of inappropriate sexual behaviour at the college were made between January 2018 and June 2025, according to Ministry of Defence (MoD) data.

Thirty-two allegations were against permanent staff and 144 against junior soldiers.

“Unacceptable and criminal behaviour has absolutely no place in our Armed Forces,” said the Army spokesperson.

“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.”

AFC is the largest military training establishment for under-19s in the UK and it receives all the Army’s 16-year-old recruits. There are currently 70 female junior soldiers at the Harrogate site out of a total of 889.

We have changed all the women’s names to protect their identities.

Ever since she was a small child, Tilly had always wanted to be a soldier.

“I liked the idea of being challenged and had always admired women in non-traditional roles,” she says. “I’d always been into action films.”

But she says her dream was shattered when she was raped at AFC by several fellow 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’,” Tilly recalls.

“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.”

Tilly left the Army two weeks after the attack.

“I couldn’t be in there. I spoke to my mum and she was like you need to leave,” she says.

“I would have just been known as the girl that shagged loads of people – that’s what I would have been known for the rest of my career, and that’s not what happened.”

The BBC understands Tilly reported the alleged rape to police but no charges were brought, partly because of what the Crown Prosecution Service later described as an “entirely inadequate” police investigation.

Tilly reached a financial settlement with North Yorkshire Police – with no admission of liability from the force.

Two of the other three women we spoke to also went to the police, but we are not reporting any details of the investigations to protect their identities.

A second woman, Monica, says a fellow soldier trapped her in a room and attacked her.

“He stood against the door so I couldn’t get out. He then pushed himself up against me, started kissing my face and touching me all over. He sexually assaulted me,” she says.

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

Monica received an unrelated medical discharge from the college, but says this came as a relief after what she had been put through.

The third woman’s story was told to us by her mother, Cheryl.

Her daughter, Amy, was sexually assaulted, she says, and had to navigate almost daily sexual harassment during her training.

Because the lock to Amy’s room was not working, says Cheryl, “she found herself sleeping across the door to stop male soldiers coming in”.

My daughter was “sold a dream” when she was recruited to the college, she adds, but it turned out to be the complete opposite in reality.

The fourth woman we have spoken to describes how misogynistic attitudes and behaviour of AFC staff rubbed off on some of the male teenagers.

In front of a group of new recruits in her first week at the college, Ellie – who says she was sexually assaulted and harassed at AFC – recalls one of the instructors saying: “It’s all about the pussy and how much of it you can get.”

Instructors would also mark girls’ looks out of 10, she says, and would “walk into our dorms without knocking, and we’d be standing there just in our knickers – they would just stare”.

Ellie says she had been desperate to be an infantry soldier.

“I wanted to serve my country and being a soldier meant I could do that at times of war. I wasn’t a girly girl and it just seemed like a perfect fit for me.”

But what happened at AFC made Ellie decide that a career in the Army was not for her.

The Army told the BBC: “We encourage anyone who has experienced or witnessed unacceptable or criminal behaviour at the Army Foundation College to come forward.”

Acknowledging that this can be difficult, it said several reforms had been introduced to support victims, including the Defence Serious Crime Command, providing specialist support through the justice process, outside of the Army chain of command.

Several adult instructors at AFC have been convicted by courts martial of physical and sexual violence in the past five years – including Cpl Daniel Conway and Cpl Simon Bartram.

In 2023, Conway was jailed for more than seven years for raping a colleague while she was sleeping. In the same year, Bartram was found guilty of sexual assault and sentenced to 20 months in military detention.

None of the allegations in our investigation relate to these instructors, but the four women say the convictions raise serious questions about the college’s culture.

A sexist attitude towards women is encouraged by some male instructors, believes Tilly.

After she was raped, she says she heard an instructor going round saying: “Have you heard about that slag who shagged all those blokes?”

“Coming from an instructor is just wrong – it sends out the wrong message about women and it teaches boys this attitude that we’re only good for one thing,” she says.

Cheryl says her daughter, Amy, also reported being subjected to misogynistic verbal abuse from staff.

“She’d be standing in line in the corridor and she’d be picked out as a massive slag or slapper because [instructors] would say it was her fault people were looking at her.

“She was told that ‘every year there is one that [the male recruits] want and it looks like this year you’re the one they want.’

“It just broke my heart, because what you forget about is that she’s just a child.”

Serious questions need to be asked about whether the college should continue operating, says Labour MP Emma Lewell, who sits on the Defence Committee.

“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,” she says.

“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.”

The UK government defines a child as anyone under 18.

The Army told the BBC a visit to AFC by the Children’s Commissioner and safeguarding authorities in January 2026 had recognised “the culture of care and the confidence junior soldiers have in raising concerns”.

It added that the college’s “robust discipline system” has been graded “outstanding” by the schools’ inspectorate, Ofsted, which visits the college every three years.

The allegations at AFC form part of wider, long-running concerns around the safety of women within the armed forces.

A 2021 review by MPs reported cases of rape, sexual exploitation of under 18s, and women being drugged before being assaulted. The review – colloquially known as the Atherton report after the lead, former MP Sarah Atherton – concluded that women were being “denied justice” by a “woefully inadequate” military complaints process.

Five years on, there are “still very, very serious concerns, as the experiences of these girls [at AFC] indicate”, says Emma Norton, a solicitor at the Centre for Military Justice, which provides legal support to former armed forces personnel.

“These are tough women – they expect to be treated robustly, so this isn’t about people complaining about things you and I might have difficulty with.

“We are talking about sustained sexual harassment and extremely serious sexual violence – some of which is being perpetrated against children – so the stakes couldn’t actually be higher for the Army”.

Last year, an ex-army sergeant major was jailed for six months for sexually assaulting a 19-year-old soldier, who later took her own life.

Warrant Officer Michael Webber, 43, pinned down Royal Artillery Gunner Jaysley Beck and tried to kiss her in July 2021. She was found dead five months later in her barracks at Larkhill, Wiltshire.

The inquest into her death ruled the sexual assault and the Army’s failure to take appropriate action “more than minimally” contributed to her taking her life.

An MoD report last year found that 67% of women in the armed forces had experienced at least one sexualised behaviour in the previous 12 months, compared to 34% of men.

And earlier this year, an internal MoD report into army training establishments and unacceptable behaviours said evidence suggested the chain of command “still have some way to go before an inclusive culture trickles down to the lowest levels”.

“Some female trainees reported ‘not being wanted’ due to females being deemed to be ‘too much trouble’,” it said – adding there was some concern for younger female trainees not confident enough to report or call out unacceptable sexual behaviour or sexism.

AFC remains committed to creating a professional, supportive, and safe environment for all recruits, the Army told us, and “any suggestion otherwise contradicts the values of respect and inclusivity that we stand for”.

Now out of the armed forces, Tilly is rebuilding her life but is still deeply affected by her brief time at AFC.

The Army’s claims of tackling inequality, she says, while promoting inclusivity and diversity, were not what she experienced in Harrogate.

“I know if I had a daughter, I would never send her to the Army,” she says.

If you have more information about this story, you can reach Sima by email at Sima.Kotecha@bbc.co.uk