As of the end of September, 2011, 214,098 active-duty servicewomen comprised 14.7% of the total active force of 1.46 million people.
Recently (in part because of the reluctance of some in Congress to renew the Violence Against Women Act), more attention has been given to the rampant sexual abuse of women in the military.
Inappropriately suggestive WWI recruitment poster, part of a historical pattern
For example, The New York Times recently ran a harrowing story featuring one of the SIXTY-TWO trainees at Lackland Air Force Base who were victims of assault or other improper conduct by THIRTY-TWO training instructors between 2009 and 2012. Virginia Messick was unable to complain to her superior, because her superior was the one who raped her.
The Department of Defense reports that over THREE THOUSAND sexual assault cases were reported in 2011 alone.
They speculate that the real figure is probably higher, closer to NINETEEN THOUSAND, estimating that only some 10-15% of survivors report assaults. There are a number of factors militating against disclosure, as shown graphically below:
Moreover, it is not as if subjecting oneself to the horrible experience of testifying has positive results. In 2011, only 1,518 of the 3,192 reported sexual assaults were considered actionable by the military, a decrease of 22% from the previous year. Prosecution rates for sexual predators are incredibly low — in 2011, less than 8% of reported cases went to trial. An estimated 10% of perpetrators resigned in lieu of courts‐martial, which effectively means the military allowed rapists to quit their jobs in order to avoid facing charges. Currently, the Navy is the only branch of the military that discharges all convicted sex offenders. Otherwise, per the Department of Defense, an astounding 1 in 3 convicted military sex offenders remain in the military!
Documented consequences of military sexual trauma (MST) most frequently includes PTSD, impairments of social functioning and quality of life (for example, a study found that more than fifty percent of homeless female veterans had experienced military sexual trauma), chronic pain, suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts.
So what’s being done? Nicole McCoy, who was assaulted several times while in the Marines, said in an NPR interview that her bad experiences started soon after she signed up:
Back in 2008, I had joined the Marine Corps and within almost exactly a year I was raped while in Afghanistan while I was at work. Continuously had to work with the same guy. He held a 9 millimeter to my head and told me that if I told anyone he’d kill me. And then I left Afghanistan after a couple months, still never told anyone.”
Her story just gets worse:
…in January of 2010 I was raped while in a hazmat course. And I went back and told one of the Marines that I was there with and I had told him what happened. He said he would contact my staff NCO. The staff NCO told me I needed to wait until I got back to my duty station, as they didn’t have any uniform victim advocates where I was. So when I got back then they told me that I missed the deadline.”
And believe it or not, the abuse continued. She finally left the Corps in 2011. Now she works as an advocate for change in the military and works to support other victims. But it’s an uphill road. As another female vet, Julie, testified on the same show:
I’m a Vietnam-era vet, and I joined in 1973, and like Nicole, I had multiple experiences with sexual assault. And let me be very clear here: I don’t feel that I’m a victim. This is something that happens to us in the military, because quite often the war that we have is with the guy standing next to us, not necessarily the guy on the other side of the gun.
And let me make a point that I’m not hearing being made: Rank has its privileges, gentlemen, and one of the most important aspects of this argument is that power – power over women is a very, very heady thing in the military. The men who attacked me had rank, and as an enlisted woman, and I wasn’t an enlisted woman the entire time I was in, they had power over me because they had rank. And I did not feel at the time of these assaults that I had the right to make an appeal to anybody else, that I felt that I would have been run out of the Army, and I’d made a commitment to my country.
So I bit on a stick. I kept walking. I didn’t make any appeal, and I simply was the good soldier. And one of the most important aspects of this, and the fundamental problem is that it starts at the top, and – may I point out Petraeus. These guys cannot keep it zipped up. It is at the very, very top ranks. This is an issue of power and the permission to do whatever they want because it comes with rank.”
Read the whole transcript here. And help fight the lack of prosecutions! If there is no punishment, there is no incentive not to continue.
[It should be noted that while women make up the overwhelming number of victims, sexual abuse is not confined to them]. The Department of Defense shows these statistics:
Any thoughts on this phenomenon or on how things could be changed?
Filed under: Sunday Salon, Women's History Month Tagged: | Sunday Salon, Women's History Month
That makes me ill. One more (of dozens) of reasons why I would be incredibly distraught if either of my kids went into the military.
Holy cow, this is disturbing. I’ve read where women reported the assault and were told to keep quiet. The military needs to put a stop to this by prosecuting every single one of those guys.
And this is why I love your blog. Thank you.
I wish I knew the answer to this. I can understand why servicewomen don’t report; what’s the use? The only thing I can say is that cops used to have the attitude that anyone who was raped was herself to blame in the 1950s. They didn’t care, and so they didn’t even try to represent the victim. Neither did male lawyers for that matter. Now there is a new protocol to follow, rape kits to be completed, and stiffer penalties. I wish I could be hopeful that attitudes will also evolve in the military but I’m not.
This absolutely breaks my heart. I went to a talk a few years ago about PTSD, and one of the women who had been on tours in Afghanistan and then Iraq said that women in her unit weren’t supposed to go to the bathroom alone at night. It was a sexual assault prevention measure. They always had to bring another woman with them. She said even though this felt like more of an inconvenience than a stressor when it was happening, it contributed to this feeling of constant, low-level fear that she had of her own fellow soldiers. So scary and sad.
Just horrifying. It amazes me how little people are willing to do to change this attitude of permission in the army. Just a reminder of how little the populace cares about women.
I hate this. I hate this. I hate this. There’s no place safe for women.To read the words, “This is something that happens to us in the military, because quite often the war that we have is with the guy standing next to us, not necessarily the guy on the other side of the gun.” How scary is that?
I just finished Criminal by Karin Slaughter in which half the book takes place in the Seventies, and (as she found from the research she did to write the book), the women police also had to be as afraid (if not more so) of their male co-workers as they were of the street criminals. Ugh.
This is a terrible situation. And I suspect the statistics, being statistics, likely don’t show the full extent of the problem. How this will be solved, I don’t know, but in non-military life things have come a long way in recent years (it wasn’t that long ago that a sexual assault victim would suffer another kind of assault in the courtroom if the case did go to trial) – so perhaps there’s hope that the military will soon catch up.
Awful, just awful, that this is not better addressed by the military. I wonder if to some at the top, they have something of an “I told you this was going to happen if women joined the military” attitude.
I hope with more discussion of these problems that there will be more awareness… and ultimately more prosecutions!
Except, as the hearing conducted by Sen. Claire McCaskill shows, even if an officer (or any military personnel) is convicted, the higher ups can dismiss any charges. This shocks and enrages me.
Did you know that more men are raped in the military than women??? There’s a documentary out there that I want to watch that exposes this and hopefully will cause a change in the way these cases are handled.
So disturbing but not surprising.
The military is a closed, male dominated, top down organization. In the case of rape and sexual abuse of women that can be an asset in dealing with the issue. If the leadership decided that there would be zero tolerance for sexual abuse, it would stop tomorrow. That process would have to take the form of relieving or bringing criminal charges against officers and NCOs implicated in sexual abuse or coverups. Leadership starts at the top, and President Obama could set an example by saying that rape and abuse will not be permitted. The new Secretary of Defense, Hagel, correctly intervened in the case of the Air Force general dismissing a case charging an officer convicted of sexual abuse. The current situation is sickening and intolerable.
My boyfriend is ex-military yet we have never really talked about this topic. We’ve talked about gays in the military and other stuff, but somehow this never came up. This is something I bet he has a strong opinion on. He didn’t serve closely with women past the first 2 years since he was special forces but I am interested to know what stories he knows. As someone who was sexually attacked on a date once, I have a hard time with this topic as it brings up that experience and I was one of the lucky ones who managed to escape the situation before it escalated to full-blown rape. I can’t imagine the trauma these women go through just to serve their country.
Makes me sick. I had a friend way back when who I saw after he returned from duty on a ship and he told me there were a couple of girls who slept with every guy on the ship. What a complete nightmare for those girls to be thought of in that way. Who knows what happened to them?