Helen Benedict has an excellent article in In These Times that examines sexual assault in the military. She writes,
“(The) Department of Defense reports show that nearly 90 percent of rape victims in the Army are junior-ranking women, whose average age is 21, while most of the assailants are non-commissioned officers or junior men, whose average age is 28.”
But as Benedict points out, we need to not only focus on the women who are the victims, but also ask some hard questions about the perpetrators of these crimes.
“Even with a force that is now 14 percent female, and with rules that prohibit drill instructors from using racial epithets and curses, those same instructors still routinely denigrate recruits by calling them “pussy,” “girl,” “bitch,” “lady” and “dyke.” The everyday speech of soldiers is still riddled with sexist insults.
Soldiers still openly peruse pornography that humiliates women. (Pornography is officially banned in the military, but is easily available to soldiers through the mail and from civilian sources, and there is a significant correlation between pornography circulation and rape rates, according to Duke’s Morris. And military men still sing the misogynist rhymes that have been around for decades. For example, Burke’s book cites this Naval Academy chant:
Who can take a chainsaw
Cut the bitch in two
Fuck the bottom half
And give the upper half to you…”
“Two studies of Army and Marine recruits, one conducted in 1996 by psychologists L.N. Rosen and L. Martin, and the other in 2005 by Jessica Wolfe and her colleagues of the Boston Veterans Affairs Health Center, both of which were published in the journal Military Medicine, found that half the male enlistees had been physically abused in childhood, one-sixth had been sexually abused, and 11 percent had experienced both. This is significant because, as psychologists have long known, childhood abuse often turns men into abusers.”
“Worse, according to the Defense Department’s own reports, the military has been exacerbating the problem by granting an increasing number of “moral waivers” to its recruits since 9/11, which means enlisting men with records of domestic and sexual violence.
Furthermore, the military has an abysmal record when it comes to catching, prosecuting and punishing its rapists. The Pentagon’s 2007 Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military found that 47 percent of the reported sexual assaults in 2007 were dismissed as unworthy of investigation, and only about 8 percent of the cases went to court-martial, reflecting the difficulty female soldiers have in making themselves heard or believed when they report sexual assault within the military. The majority of assailants were given what the Pentagon calls “nonjudicial punishments, administrative actions and discharges.” By contrast, in civilian life, 40 percent of those accused of sex crimes are prosecuted.”
In other words, the misogyny that is pervasively systemic across military customs and structure are significantly implicated in the continuing epidemic of sexual assault in the military. What we see occurring in today’s military is just another permutation on the hatred of women that has always been part of militarism. And it also helps explain why, despite hearings, reports and sensitivity training ad nauseum, the problem continues unabated.
Of course women in th U.S. military aren’t the only victims of sexual assault as a result of U.S. military culture and policy. Suki Falconberg has an excellent piece on Women’s Space about the Iraqi women who are being forced to sell their bodies for sex in order to survive and feed their families. I really can’t say it any better than she does–when 10 year old girls are forced to sell their bodies, that is war,
“In my view, the story of the 10-year-old Iraqi girl, forced to have sex for money, this is war. All the rhetoric of politicians and journalists cannot excuse what has happened to her. All the fancy phrases about a war being “A Right War” or “A Just War” have no meaning for her. Is the woman who must walk the streets of Baghdad and sell her body to feed her children in any way aware of the politicians, sitting in their neat offices, making the decisions that have destroyed her life? Would she consider this ‘a right war’ and ‘a just war’ and a war for her ‘freedom’? What do these men and women–who have endless debates, in their safe offices, about policy and weapons and troop reductions–have to do with her? The thing is: a woman never, ever thinks: what a great war this is—it has given me the ‘freedom’ to sell my body.”
What Benedict and Falconberg are saying are not separate issues, they are indeed quite connected. And until we demand that those who wage wars be responsible for the impact that their actions have beyond the so-called battlefield, women and children will continue to be the ones most victimized by war and military conflict.
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