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Video clips, seen by The Independent, show a woman having sex with troops from 16 Air Assault Brigade while others watched. Some of the soldiers can be seen laughing.

In other clip, a man asks “have you had a go yet?”, while another troop salutes while having sex. The video, which includes some half-naked and fully naked soldiers, shows sexual acts occurring in both communal places and private rooms, but it is not immediately clear when it happened.

Talking to The Independent from a military estate where she lives with her husband who is in the army, the woman said an ex-soldier, who she hadn’t heard from in months, had sent her 11 unsolicited highly graphic videos of the incident at Merlville.

She found the footage “extremely distressing and disturbing” and said it gave her nightmares, explaining that even if the encounter was consensual, the fact the soldiers can be heard “laughing” and mocking the woman was “degrading”.

“It is misogynistic,” she added. “It is an embarrassment to the army. It shows a serious lack of professionalism and decent human behaviour in general.”

Her comments come as General Sir Patrick Sanders, the army’s new head, announced hundreds of paratroops were barred from a Nato deployment to the Balkans following the incident, because he was unwilling to “risk the mission or the reputation of the British army” by sending the troops abroad. 

But the whistleblower said stories of group sex similar to what occurred at Merlville, were commonpace in the army, claiming some soldiers would say such incidents were “normal”, insisting “it is just boys being boys”.

She added: “I find raising children in this environment very scary. Among many men in the army, there is the assumption women are joining the army for sex, or at least they must expect that to happen if they do join.

“I’ve seen a lot of slut-shaming. In general it is assumed that females in the military must be sleeping with multiple members of the Battalion.”

She described the armed forces as having a “very sexually charged culture” plagued with the commonly held view that women are “objects for the pleasure of men”.

The whistleblower said: “In my experience, the sexual culture is really rife when soldiers are young and living in the block. Sometimes women are snuck in inside the boot of people’s cars. The drinking culture is something else.

“You hear stories of single soldiers living on the block drinking every weekend, fights consistently happening, and property being damaged. When soldiers get married then it can move into swinging.”

Discussing her own negative experiences of working in military recruitment, she said she stepped down after facing sexual harassment, sexism and gender-based discrimination.

She said it felt “hyprocritical” being asked to encourage women to join the army given her own experiences.

The whistleblower added: “I’m not surprised women face sexual harassment and assault in the army given it starts in the recruitment process.

“The people who are doing the recruitment process are biased. They have judgements about women being in the army, they don’t believe they can do it. They refer to women in derogatory ways. They think the standards for women aren’t as high. They talk about the fact women have their periods.”

She claimed most of the male soldiers she encountered did not believe women should be in the army. The whisteblower said she was aware of around half a dozen women submitting complaints about sexual harssment, sexism and gender-based discrimination at one recruitment centre in particular

The whistleblower said she had met five women who say they were raped while serving in the military. She said women in senior roles were often referred to as having got their position “by sleeping their way there”, and explained when she made “an effort” with her appearance she was subjected to degrading sexual comments.

“Although the army has made all roles open to women, the army itself is not open to women,” she concluded. “You have to be willing to act like a man to be accepted. This means put up with discrimination, sexism, sexual harassment, and misogynistic jokes and banter about rape.”

She said the army fostered a culture where soldiers are expected to keep their wives or partners in line and tell them what to do. While her husband loves his job, he also thinks army attitudes towards women - both military and civilian - are outdated, the whistleblower said.

She added: “He will tell me before we go to a function, if higher ranking men are doing a speech, I must not go to the toilet, otherwise he could be given extra duties - which means getting crap jobs to do.

“When my husband helps with parenting, he is commonly told this should be my job and he is mocked and fellow soldiers question my motherhood skills.”

Issues within the army are easily concealed due to it being an insular environment, the whistleblower added, noting the armed forces take on many young men and women who are escaping difficult backgrounds.

She added: “It can be make or break. That environment can save them. But it is also very easy to teach an unacceptable culture rather than nurture them into decent human beings. 

“If you are brought up in an environment where abuse was normal, and then you join the army and nobody is saying: ‘No that is not okay’, or are actually actively allowing bad behaviour or not taking it seriously, it is very damaging to the soldiers.”

The woman’s comments come after senior figures previously told The Independent progress on tackling sexism and sexual harassment in the armed forces has been too slow and women in the military often face a sexist culture of “laddish behaviour”. Meanwhile, MPs have rasied concern that convictions rates for rape and sexual assault cases remain “shamefully low” in the military.

A troubling report released last year found sexual harassment, bullying and physical assault of women is prevalent in the armed forces.

Researchers, who polled 750 women veterans, discovered almost a quarter reported having experienced sexual harassment, while almost a quarter said they had been subjected to emotional bullying. The report, published in BMJ Military Health, found five per cent were sexually assaulted and three per cent physically assaulted.

Women make up around 11 per cent of the armed forces in the UK, according to Ministry of Defence data.

The army did not want to comment on the whisleblower’s allegations.

But in response to the Merlville incident, General Sanders said: “The recent conduct of some members of the battalion has fallen short of that which we all expect of our army”.

For most businesses, workers are less exposed to risks from their boss's strategic errors. If your boss screws up, you might see a lower annual bonus, or take a career hit thanks to the bad company's presence on your CV. Of course, if your boss really messes up they might lay you off or go out of business altogether, but it's a rare business that gets to externalize its risks onto its workers on a shift-by-shift basis the way restaurants get to.

But as sweet as restaurateurs have it, that's nothing compared to the incredible deal that gig platforms get. Companies like Uber and Lyft get to shift nearly all their risk to their workers, and then insist that they're doing workers a favor by offering them "flexibility." Like a restaurateur, Uber and Lyft control all the mechanisms by which the number of riders is set. They decide how to advertise and how to price their rides. When a driver signs on and makes themselves available – at no charge – to Uber, it is the company's actions, not the driver's, that determine whether that driver gets a job, and how much they'll get paid.

Uber and Lyft claim that drivers have control, too – when (if) they're offered a job, they get to decide whether to take it. This is true, but it's more complicated than that. Drivers get about 15 seconds (!) to decide whether to accept a job, which means they have 15 seconds to calculate the mileage and time-based rate on offer, all while operating a vehicle in traffic. Drivers who accept lowball offers risk having their base pay permanently eroded through "algorithmic wage discrimination," which is when the gig platforms infer that workers who accept very low wages are economically desperate and can be offered even lower wages in the future:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But workers can't simply refuse offers and wait for the wage on offer to increase. That increase may happen, but if a driver is too picky, the platform will punish them for turning down too many offers by excluding them from future opportunities. If this happens often enough, the driver may end up broke enough to start accepting those lowballs, triggering the inexorable downward trajectory of their expected earnings.

This is "flexibility," but mostly it's flexibility for Uber, not for drivers. Uber controls when a driver gets paid, and they control the data about that payment. This allows Uber to claim to be paying well north of minimum wage, while drivers average less than $2.50/hour. Uber exploits its information asymmetry to publish only the numerator (the amount a driver makes when a passenger is in the car) while hiding the denominator (how many hours it takes for Uber to put a passenger in that car):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

Uber has perfected a system of algorithmic pricing that allows it to dangle just enough money in front of drivers to maximize their number on the road, irrespective of how many riders are looking for cars. The fact that they have all the information (while drivers have none) allows them to extract vast amounts of totally unpaid labor from those drivers. And then, once a passenger gets in the car, Uber's informational systems let it pay that driver the absolute minimum they will accept for the ride.

Of course, it works the same way for passengers, each of whom is offered a different price for the same rides, based on the company's surveillance data and its realtime calculations about how much the rider is willing to pay. When Uber launched, driver pay and passenger fares were linked (the same way a server's tips and the cost of a meal are linked). Today, these are fully decoupled. Uber runs a kind of cod-Marxist operation where workers are paid according to their desperation, and passengers are gouged according to their ability to pay:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

This works so well (for Uber) that Uber has launched a side hustle selling algorithmic pricing and algorithmic wage discrimination systems to companies in other sectors, so expect this arrangement to infect ever-wider swathes of the economy:

https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2025/Uber-Expands-AI-Data-Platform-to-Power-Next-Gen-Enterprise-and-AI-Lab-Needs/default.aspx

(And this is neither here nor there, but holy shit, is Uber's investor relations site seriously serving ASPX pages in 2026?! Hey Khosrowshahi, the DOJ called and it wants its Clinton-era antitrust evidence back!)

Back to algorithmic pricing: this opaque, take-it-or-leave-it algorithmic pricing arrangement sets Uber apart from other platforms where sellers offer temporary use of their property to buyers. As Weil writes, at least Airbnb hosts get to override the nightly rate suggested by the platform (though I'd add that the platforms will downrank and bury people who resist their suggestions).

As Weil points out, even if Uber had to pay the minimum wage and assume other operational risks associated with running a business, they'd still have access to these algorithmic tools, albeit with different parameters. Rather than setting the wage floor for drivers at $0/hour, they'd have to pay $7.25/hour (the federal minimum wage, or more, depending on the state). This would force the company to refuse shifts to drivers when there were enough workers on the road to handle demand, but drivers would benefit from this arrangement – rather than driving around for a shift, burning gas and putting wear on your car without getting paid, Uber would just tell you to stay home.

Uber could try to offload those risks onto passengers, but remember, Uber is already charging riders a personalized price based on massive troves of surveillance data that is continuously re-analyzed to guess the largest sum you're willing to pay for any given ride. You're already paying the highest price Uber can set for you, in other words.

Weil has been in many forums – including that Massachusetts courtroom – where Uber touted its "flexibility" as a benefit to drivers. But as he shows, Uber could offer all the same flexibility to drivers without the downside risk of driving around for hours without earning a dime. Sure, forcing Uber and Lyft to extend rights and protections that every employee gets would raise their costs – but "the same is true for any company having to comply with employment law and work protections."

Outside of the US, these companies are being forced to shift the risk from their workers' backs to their own balance sheets. As Weil writes, the UN's International Labor Organization has set binding labor standards for gig companies, called Convention 193, "Decent Work in the Platform Economy":

https://onlabor.org/a-win-for-platform-workers-ilo-convention-no-193/

The US government is pulling out all the stops to prevent these standards from being applied to US gig companies, even abroad. Trump's labor boss Keith Sonderling told the world that the US government "will not sit on the sidelines while some foreign governments push to hamper American innovation in the gig economy worldwide":

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3435961/america-must-lead-gig-economy/

But, as Weil says, this isn't about innovation, flexibility or AI. It's about gig companies changing the distributional outcome of whole sectors, to shift money from workers to investors.

The rest of the world has its own ideas. In Switzerland, the Supreme Court found that gig companies' businesses were illegal and ordered them to extend normal labor protections to gig workers. Naturally, the gig companies just ignored the law and continued to screw those workers. Gig workers, as noted, are diffused. They don't work in the same place. They have no way to find out who else works for the same boss as they do. The same factors that keep us from gathering stats on gig work also keeps gig workers from comparing notes on how they're getting shafted.

What's a labor organizer to do? The Swiss labor union Syndicom came up with an ingenious solution. They partnered with a popular, pro-union pizza restaurant, listed it on the delivery platforms, and then placed orders for tons of pizzas through the scofflaw food-delivery platforms. They transformed the pizzeria into a pop-up union labor hub, and had an organizing conversation with every rider the company dispatched to the restaurant:

https://vimeo.com/1203473793

This is deliciously ingenious, and the labor organizing need not stop there. Companies like Para have shown how, by jailbreaking the apps used by gig workers, they can allow those workers to comparison shop for the best wage. Rather than getting 15 seconds while navigating traffic to decide whether a job is worth taking, drivers and riders could use a "counter-app" that evaluates all the offers on all the platforms and coordinates with other workers to mass-reject lowball offers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app

The only problem is the "anticircumvention" laws that criminalize this kind of reverse-engineering and modifications of apps. These laws make it a literal crime to change how an app running on your own phone works. These laws were invented in America, with 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but in the ensuing years, the US Trade Rep has used the threat of tariffs to force every country in the world to adopt their own anticircumvention laws. By caving into US bullying, all of America's trading partners have left their workers and consumers vulnerable to technological surveillance, manipulation and price-gouging, to the great benefit of the US tech companies that have fused with the Trump regime.

This is the hidden silver lining to Trump's lunatic tariffs: they take away the threat that kept all those US-protecting foreign IP laws in force. When someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as you're told, and then they burn your house down anyway, you really don't have to keep complying:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

The possibilities for counterapps in gig work are endless. In Indonesia, gig rider co-ops commission "Tuyul" apps that mod their dispatch apps in ways small (upsizing the font) and large (spoofing the GPS):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

In his article, Weil cites a study showing that customers for gig apps tend not to comparison shop – once you choose your default taxi-hailing app, that becomes your go-to. But with counter-apps, your default could be a price-comparison app that bids out your job to all the platforms and chooses the cheapest one, forcing the gig companies to compete with each other:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5729723

The platforms like to pitch themselves as "frictionless," but the reality is that they don't reduce friction so much as reallocate it. Because they control the technology, because the law makes it a literal crime to wrestle that control away, they can shift all the friction from their side of the ledger to yours, whether you're a worker or a customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/23/become-unoptimizable/#downward-redistribution

Tony West isn't lying when he says Uber values flexibility – they value their flexibility, which arises out of the constraints (technical, legal) they impose on us: the drivers and passengers.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: