I came across some information yesterday that has left me speechless. I just don’t know what to say about it. I want to say that I’m shocked, but I’m not sure that adequately describes my feeling. Sickened. Maybe that’s a better word. I’ll just lay it out for you and you can have your own reaction.
- 30% of women serving in the United States military are victims of attempted or completed rape at the hands of their fellow soldiers.
- 71% of women serving in the United States military are sexually assaulted and 90% are subjected to sexual harassment.
Please. Take a moment and reflect upon those numbers. Let them sink in.
If you’re like me, on first impression you’ll find these figures impossible to believe. You’ll want to know what sensationalist rag published such an outrageous libel of U.S. troops. Undoubtedly, you’ll say to yourself, those numbers are ridiculous, cooked up by some crackpot, fringe element news outlet that will say absolutely anything to discredit the American military. You won’t want to believe that any of this is true.
If those numbers were accurate, you’ll quite reasonably ask, wouldn’t this story be on the front page of every newspaper in America and the lead item on every news broadcast? For God’s sake, you’d certainly think so. But, you’d be wrong!
Another astonishing fact about all of this is that it’s nothing new. The military has known all of this for several years. The fact that 30% of female service members are the victims of completed or attempted rape was established in a study conducted by the University of Iowa in conjunction with the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in 2003, a study funded by the Department of Defense. That news is seven years old!
All the numbers quoted above come straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak—straight from the Department of Veterans Affairs, one of it’s contractors. or the DoD. Last year, the Pentagon issued a report in which it sadly admitted that 1 in 3 women serving in the military will be victims of sexual assault at some point during their service, a figure which counts only cases that are actually reported through official channels. The Pentagon also admitted that an estimated 90% of sexual assaults and rapes are not reported.
Last year 2,900 sexual assaults were formally reported. Let’s do a little math. If 90% of these vile criminal acts are not reported, that means that 29,000 rapes and sexual assaults occurred in the U.S. military in 2009 alone. Think about that. Twenty-nine thousand American women were raped or sexually assaulted by U.S. soldiers, their brothers in arms, during the past twelve months.
What if it were discovered tomorrow that 30% of all female employees at Walmart were the victims of rape or attempted rape in the workplace last year. Think you’d hear about that on CNN?
Suppose we all learned that 71% of women working for Bank of America were sexually assaulted—not just sexually harassed, but actually assaulted by their male co-workers. Reckon you’d hear about that on the nightly news?
I’ll bet that Army, Navy and Marine Corps recruiting officers aren’t advertising these figures to prospective female recruits. Join the Army, see the world, and get raped!
Over the past several years quite a number of high schools and colleges have banned military recruiters from their campuses and have sought to exclude them from events such as job fairs. I have never supported these actions. Banning military recruiters has seemed almost unpatriotic to me, but I have changed my mind. I repent of my former position. I don’t want a military recruiter anywhere around a teenage girl.
“There are only three things the guys let you be if you’re a girl in the military: a bitch, a ho or a dyke. One guy told me he thinks the military sends women over to give the guys eye candy to keep them sane. He told me in Vietnam they had prostitutes, but they don’t have those in Iraq, so they have women soldiers instead.” —Army Spc. Mickiela Montoya, who served in Iraq for 11 months from 2005-2006, quoted by Helen Benedict in The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq.
So, what’s going on? How in the world has this happened? For every woman on the receiving end of those 29,000 annual sexual assaults there is a male soldier on the other side, often a superior officer. How did so many sexual predators find their way into uniform?
Have we stepped up recruiting efforts in red light districts? Are we conducting recruiting drives in jails? Or is it just the nature of our military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan that somehow turns large numbers of soldiers into whatever kind of loathsome creatures it takes to violate, humiliate, brutalize and terrorize American women, their fellow soldiers, in this way? I don’t know. I can’t explain it. I can’t even imagine it. I don’t want to believe that it’s true.
Every day we Americans show that we’ll put up with a lot. Day in and day out we put up with the economic exploitation of ourselves and our loved ones, quietly serving our corporate masters, even giving our lives in their wars. We couldn’t do it if we didn’t delude ourselves into thinking it all somehow glorious. Thinking that, somehow, it’s our duty. It isn’t.
How inglorious is this? Twenty-nine thousand young American women sexually assaulted while trying to do their duty for their country. When Uncle Sam said, “I Want You!” who imagined this is what he meant?
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Photo Credit: kalacaw/flickr
Suggested Reading: Why Soldiers Rape: Culture of Misogyny, illegal occupation, fuel sexual violence in the military.
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I’d like to say I’m surprised or even shocked by this information however, sadly I’m not. I’ve had a long-standing observation of two particular groups: the miliary and law enforcement and the kinds of people that decide to make those two areas their career. They cross all economic and social lines. Anyone that knows me really well knows that I have a healthy disdain for both groups and here’s why.
What I’ve experienced and observed is that for every man who truly wants to serve his country in wartimes or through public service as law enforcement for the RIGHT reasons, there are at least three or four who chose those particular paths because it allows them to exert power and control over others. Give them enough power and eventually they will show their true colors. Both avenues train their recruits to be powerful and exertive due to the situations they will be exposed to. Train the right guy and you’ve got a person who truly wants to serve their country and protect it’s people but train the wrong guy and you’ve got a loose cannon on your hands. Train enough of the wrong guys and you’ve got a boys club that will stand by one another or look the other way.
What’s the saying? Numbers don’t lie? These numbers don’t lie.
Men who enlist in the military today do so for a variety of reasons. Some do it from a genuine patriotism and a desire to serve the country. Others do it because they want the training opportunities, the educational benefits and the other things that go along with being a veteran. Still, others enlist to get out of poverty. What is disturbing, though, is the number of recruits who require conduct waivers to qualify for enlistment. A recruit with a felony record or non-traffic related criminal offense cannot enlist without a conduct waiver, and all branches of the military have been very freely granting them for the past several years.
While the military claims that these waivers do not constitute a “lowering of military standards,” the evidence shows otherwise. Soldiers who received conduct waivers separate from the military due to “alcohol rehabilitation failure” at a rate more than twice that of other soldiers, almost twice as frequently for misconduct, and the desertion rate is higher as well. These numbers come from a 2008 Army press release. It would, I think, be expected that this group would also commit sexual assault at a higher rate than non-waiver recruits. I have no science to support that, but it certainly seems intuitive.
The Army denies that it grants conduct waivers for those convicted of sexually violent crimes, but there are many reports of recruiters turning a blind eye to evidence of such misconduct in the difficult recruiting environment which has existed for the past several years. Perhaps this is an unavoidable feature of an all-volunteer army, and one more reason to revisit the idea of re-instituting the draft.
I don’t mean to suggest that conduct waivers are altogether responsible for the ill-treatment of women in the military, But I do think they combine to be a significant contributing factor, together with the general disrespect that military culture has for women and the nature of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There is a code of silence surrounding sexual harassment and even sexual assault that makes it very difficult for a complaining female soldier to prove her case. That is why most victims do not report incidents and why most perpetrators get away with what they’ve done. Victims are afraid to report the crimes and male soldiers are trained and pressured to close ranks and stonewall any investigation whenever any one of them is accused.