Feminist Peace Network

The Catch 22 Of Ending Sexual Violence In The U.S. Military

Mar 172013

At its root, the problem of sexual assault and harassment in the U.S. military is the quintessential Catch 22. As witnesses, Senators, and even representatives of the military admitted at a Senate hearing on the problem last week, the shocking amount of sexual violence that is going on in our military is being done by perpetrators who use it to assert dominance and power over those they perceive to be weaker as a way of telling them who is in control. Which is also precisely what dominant military forces do and have done since the beginning of patriarchal time with whatever weaponry has been available to them. And that is why it is so difficult, if not impossible to get traction in eradicating sexual violence in the military. To do so would necessitate confronting the very ethos of militarism.

The impact of sexual assault against women in the military has been and continues to be horrific. A notable point that was made at the hearings last week however, and one which is crucial to understand is that men actually make up the majority of victims of sexual assault and rape in the military. Given that men make up approximately 85% of our armed forces, that isn’t surprising although women are victimized at a much higher rate:

Of the estimated 19,000 reported sexual assaults and rapes in the armed forces last year, the majority were actually committed against men.
Men are assaulted at a lower rate — 1% of servicemen reported being attacked by a comrade last year versus 4.4% of women — but that still translates to more than 10,000 cases compared with 9,000 attacks on female recruits and officers.

And as The Daily Beast pointed out in 2011,

Last year (2010) nearly 50,000 male veterans screened positive for “military sexual trauma” at the Department of Veterans Affairs, up from just over 30,000 in 2003. For the victims, the experience is a special kind of hell—a soldier can’t just quit his job to get away from his abusers. But now, as the Pentagon has begun to acknowledge the rampant problem of sexual violence for both genders, men are coming forward in unprecedented numbers, telling their stories and hoping that speaking up will help them, and others, put their lives back together.

When Brian K. Lewis testified at the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing last week, he became the first male victim of sexual abuse to testify before Congress. But the problem is hardly a new one and has likely existed as long as there have been military forces. In recent years as hearing after hearing has been held regarding sexual assault against women in the armed forces, the problem of assaults against men has indeed been known, but has not garnered much national attention. In 2003, Florida Today published as report that indicated that the military was well aware of how widespread the problem is,

Florida Today obtained the VA’s preliminary findings from its sexual trauma survey of 1.67 million veterans enrolled in 1,300 VA health care facilities across the country. It examined VA records and interviewed government and private psychologists across the United States. And it used the Freedom of Information Act to seek reports and prosecution information from the military. It found: Thousands of victims. Nearly 22,500 male veterans — more than one of every 100 former soldiers, sailors and airmen treated by the VA — reported being sexually “traumatized” by peers or superiors during their military careers, VA survey records show. That includes 769 men in the VA’s Central Florida Health Care System, which includes Brevard County, Orlando and the Tampa Bay area. Most men who answer, “yes,” to sexual trauma are being treated for other ailments by the VA, and only a small fraction are being treated exclusively for their military sexual abuse…

…Domination the prime motive. Veterans Affairs psychologists who are treating sexually assaulted vets described most male victims as the youngest, lowest-ranking enlistees in the military, and the sexual assaults were carried out to humiliate or demean the victims. Such attacks are not homosexual acts, but efforts to assert power over others, the VA psychologists stressed. These nationwide counselors interviewed by Florida Today said most of the VA’s treatment cases involved physical abuse, not insults or harassment. “It’s pretty clear that we’re discussing unwanted sexual activity that’s coercive in nature,” said Art Rosenblatt, coordinator of the VA’s military sexual trauma program in Central Florida…

…Among the men being treated by the VA, sexual trauma victims have described officers or older enlisted men gang raping recruits, soldiers sodomizing victims with gunbarrels and forcing young enlistees to perform oral sex.

———-

In her opening testimony at last week’s hearing, Senator Barbara Boxer pointed out that we need to see sexual violence as the vicious crime that it is, not as a problem of disrespect. Unfortunately, as the representatives of the various branches of the military testified, while they acknowledge that sexual assault and harassment is happening, the armed forces are still doggedly refusing to make the substantive changes in how these crimes are reported and prosecuted and how victims and perpetrators are treated, that would begin to realistically address the problem. Instead they point to support programs that lack the empowerment to take action and point to posters that say, “Ask Her When She’s Sober” as actions they are taking to respond to the situation. It seems all but impossible for them to address the issue without framing it in the context of maintaining order, discipline and chain of command. Time and again victims talk about having to continue to serve with their assailants, with being denied medical care and timely due process.

Former Sergeant Rebekah Havrilla spoke also in her testimony of the constant atmosphere of sexual harassment and intimidation including hearing from a chaplain that rape was God’s will. Havrilla also described how efforts to educate about sexual violence were not taken seriously,

We had a sexual assault and harassment training that we went through and one of our sergeants got up on the table and stripped completely naked and danced and laughed at it. That’s the kind of culture I lived in on a daily basis.

———-

One of the key problems is that sexual assaults and rapes must be reported up the chain of command. All too often, it is those higher ups that are perpetrating the assaults and in other ways have a vested interest in making charges and evidence disappear because crimes in their units would look bad on their records. They are far more likely to force the victim out of the service without benefits or medical care than to force out or charge the perpetrator.

In The Invisible War, a recently released documentary about sexual violence in the military, we learn that a Navy study found that 15% of incoming recruits have attempted or committed sexual assault before entering the military (twice the percentage of the civilian population), yet they are not denied entry into the military. And as those interviewed in the film point out, when these crimes aren’t prosecuted in the military, the perpetrators are free to continue assaulting others both inside and out of the military.

As Representative Jackie Speier recently pointed out, one of the problems is that the military justice system serves the assailants far better than it serves the victims. Kirby Dick, producer of the deservedly acclaimed The Invisible War, which minces no words in documenting the atrocities that are taking place, calls the problem structural.

And that is indeed so and why addressing the problem is a real Catch 22. As Senator Lindsey Graham pointed out at last week’s hearing, the military is not a democracy. Graham was making the deeply offensive point that this was why victims could not expect the kind of justice they would get in the civilian world. But there is and always has been the horrible irony that the body that is supposed to defend a democratic way of life is essentially a totalitarian, top-down system that perpetrates the same kind of power over violence that is at the heart of sexual violence.

In the hearing numerous references were made to our being at war. But let’s remember, it is a war that we started and continue to wage although the definition of what we are fighting against is far from clear and hard questions have to be asked about whose purpose it serves. Clearly it is a drain on our resources, has done catastrophic damage to other countries and has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. There is little to demonstrate that it makes us safer and seems far more likely to simply foment more danger for the entire world.

And in the meantime, each year, tens of thousands of our own troops are harmed by their fellow soldiers. And the awful truth is that violence cannot be stopped in a system that is predicated on precisely the same kind of justification of dominator violence. Until we confront that, the atrocities that members of our military are committing against each other will continue.

March 17, 2013 Posted by Fempeace on March 17, 2013 Comments Off

Leaning On Sheryl Sandberg

Feb 242013

Not only does Facebook have a woman problem, but one has to wonder if the only woman on their board does too. Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, “Lean In”, exhorts women to quit holding themselves back in the business world which she says is part of the reason that women are so poorly represented at the upper echelons of the corporate world.

“We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” Sandberg writes in the book, called “Lean In.”

“We internalize the negative messages we get throughout our lives, the messages that say it’s wrong to be outspoken, aggressive, more powerful than men. We lower our own expectations of what we can achieve. We continue to do the majority of the housework and child care. We compromise our career goals to make room for partners and children who may not even exist yet.”

And how does one “lean in”?

When her book is published on March 11, accompanied by a carefully orchestrated media campaign, she hopes to create her own version of the consciousness-raising groups of yore: “Lean In Circles,” as she calls them, in which women can share experiences and follow a Sandberg-crafted curriculum for career success. (First assignment: a video on how to command more authority at work by changing how they speak and even sit.)

“I always thought I would run a social movement,” Ms. Sandberg, 43, said in an interview for “Makers,” a new documentary on feminist history.

Allow me to unpackage that for you, Ms. Sandberg. First of all, do you have a clue what a consciousness raising circle is? Here’s a hint–it doesn’t have a curricula where someone tells you what you are supposed to do. Secondly, you may want to read up on social movements–one person doesn’t get to run them.

And I’m guessing that leaning in, if that even makes sense (we’ll get there in a minute), is a lot easier for someone who owns a 9,000 square foot house and has no problem paying the nanny than someone who is one step from bankruptcy because of medical bills and house payments and is holding down two jobs just to keep food on the table. Sorry, but most of us have a little trouble relating to where you are coming from.

But all of that is beside the point. What irks me is the notion that if women behave differently, the corporate world will welcome them in and hold the ladder while they climb to the top. In what way is this really different than telling a woman that what she wore precipitated a rape? I’m also thinking of military generals telling women that if they take on combat roles they will finally be paid equally and maybe be less likely to be sexually assaulted. The problem with that, and the problem with what Sandberg is saying is that the real issue is that there is something terribly wrong with the power-over dominator system on which the corporate and military power structures depend. And even if a higher percentage of women rise to the top, most women, and for that matter most men, will still be at the bottom.

So no, Ms. Sandberg, leaning in is neither useful or appropriate.

Which leads me to my second point. Nowhere is this more clear than Facebook and its attitude towards women. There have been numerous instances of images of breasts that are illustrating posts about breast cancer or breast feeding being removed (and sometimes the pages where they appear being suspended with ominous notes sent to the poster telling them they are violating Facebook’s terms of service) while pages that objectify women and glorify rape and violence against women are allowed to remain up despite protests.

The site’s community standards state: “Facebook does not permit hate speech, but distinguishes between serious and humorous speech.” What is not clear, in spite of several high-profile campaigns and a Change.org petition that garnered more than 200,000 signatures, is how it makes that distinction. Over the past few years, women say they have been banned from the site and seen their pages removed for posting images of cupcakes iced like labia, pictures of breastfeeding mothers and photographs of women post-mastectomy.

Yet images currently appearing on the site include a joke about raping a disabled child, a joke about sex with an underage girl and image after image after image of women beaten, bloodied and black-eyed in graphic domestic violence “jokes”. There are countless groups with names such as “Sum sluts need their throats slit” and “Its Not ‘rape’ If They’re Dead And If They’re Alive Its Surprise Sex”. One of the worst images I came across in a brief search shows a woman’s flesh, with the words “Daddy f*cked me and I loved it” carved into it in freshly bleeding wounds.

It is very difficult to protest when Facebook deletes a post or suspends a page. I found that out after they removed an image that was explicit but most definitely not pornographic from a page that I administer. They sent me a letter of warning but did not give me any way to respond or explain their error. That has an impact–whenever I consider whether to post something similar (and when you write a lot about violence against women and women’s health topics, that is a frequent issue), I factor in the risk that they could take down my page or ban me from Facebook although I’ve done nothing wrong. On several occasions, I’ve elected to take a pass on posting something because I don’t want to lose my page.

So am I supposed to lean in and buy Ms. Sandberg’s book? I don’t think so. It’s a catchy, feels like I’m doing something to help myself even though the system is totally stacked against me sort of a phrase that we hear all too often in situations of oppression. As KPFK’s Feminist Magazine puts it so eloquently on their Facebook page,

Dear Sheryl Sandberg: telling women they’re the problem and that they need to buy your book and watch your videos to ‘have it all ‘ isn’t feminist, nor a “social movement” (oh & PS – have you seen all the misogynistic and hateful pages that Facebook won’t take down – what about that?)

And that, Ms. Sandberg is why, rather than making nice and trying to play the game, I’ll continue to stand my ground and speak my peace.

———-

A few other pieces about this that you should consider reading:

February 24, 2013 Posted by Fempeace on February 24, 2013 4 Responses »

Women Serving In Combat Is Not A Panacea For The Epidemic Of Sexual Assault In The Military

Jan 252013

Since Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced that women will now be allowed to serve in combat, the argument has been made from liberals and conservatives and from military brass that this move will help stop the epidemic of sexual assault in the military. As I pointed out yesterday,

It is also hugely ironic that Panetta’s announcement came the same day that Congress was holding yet another hearing on the intractable problem of sexual assault in the military. The truth is that women are more likely to be attacked by other members of our military than by any enemy. The New York Times’ Gail Collins makes the unfortunate suggestion that having more women rise in the ranks might,

make things better because it will mean more women at the top of the military, and that, inevitably, will mean more attention to women’s issues.

Sexual assault in the military is not a woman’s issue. It is an epidemic and a national disgrace that is a direct result of the misguided notion of militarism that posits that strength comes from asserting power over others. Militarism has never been good for women because, among other reasons, it places them in harms way by armies that rape and assault women as a de facto military strategy and because women are more likely to become refugees, unable to support themselves or take care of their families and placing them in further danger of physical and sexual attack.

General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff also makes the argument that more equality will lead to more respect and hence less sexual assault in the ranks, but the military is still a top-down power over structure and women who do serve in lower ranks will continue to be vulnerable. And let’s face it, we live in a country where Congress just failed to re-authorize the Violence Against Women Act and where we still don’t have the Equal Rights Amendment and the Senate has yet to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The disrespect of women’s rights, safety and well-being is a de facto national policy in the U.S.

A compelling argument can be made that women in positions of authority and power are likely to be a constructive influence in addressing this problem. But getting there is a slow process and let’s be real–women are a minority in the military and the odds of them being a substantive part of leadership any time soon is nil. There is also an argument to be made that when women and men are treated equally as a matter of policy then men are less likely to treat women as less than equal.

But in this case, we need to take a very hard look at what kind of equality we are granting to women and in this case it is the equal right to participate in a system that perpetrates and perpetuates violence and creates an atmosphere where women are highly likely to be victimized. That should not be the kind of equality we aspire to reach.

As I have said numerous times, I do not think the problem of sexual assault is truly solvable in a power over, dominator system such as the military, and as Holly Kearl’s recent reporting of the Congressional hearings into sexual assault in the military make clear, the Pentagon is not at all willing to take the necessary steps to address the issue or to even listen to the victims.

Just like the other military branches, however, the Air Force does not want to change the authority commanders have over the reporting and disciplinary process in these cases, even though clearly there are commanders who abuse their authority.

During the Q-and-A portion, I was shocked to learn from Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) that not a single survivor who had come forward was interviewed during the Lackland investigation. Speier said she even wrote a letter in November requesting that survivors’ voices be included — and she was ignored.

If the military is not prepared to listen and to take very doable action now, telling women that going into combat is going to solve the problem is an outrage. The notion of going into combat and risking our lives and our health when the military has demonstrated time and again that they don’t want to act decisively to stop sexual abuse in the ranks should really give us pause to consider just how little they value women’s lives.

———-

I also want to share some additional thoughts in response to my earlier piece on why I don’t think women in combat is a step forward. I am fully aware that women are all too often already in de facto combat positions and they do deserve to be compensated accordingly. That does not mean we should aspire to that as a way achieve equality. As someone recently pointed out to me, we need to take into account the context in which we are achieving equality, in this case a system that has traditionally seen women’s bodies as weapons of war and/or regrettable collateral damage. Nor am I persuaded by the argument that there will always be war so therefore why shouldn’t women participate equally. There doesn’t always have to be war and better we should work to stop that from happening. Nor should we consider the military to be a way to get an education and job training. That isn’t the purpose of our armed forces, only an incidental necessity. If we want better job training and education then we need to fund those programs and make them affordable instead of sinking our money into the military.

January 25, 2013 Posted by Fempeace on January 25, 2013 2 Responses »

Why Serving In Combat Does Not Serve Women (Or Anyone Else) Well

Jan 242013

Crucial as it is for women to have the same opportunities and benefits as men who do comparable work, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s announcement that women can now serve in combat positions in the military should not be misconstrued as a step forward for women.

As the women’s rights advocacy group AF3IRM GABNET said in a statement on their Facebook page,

The Pentagon lifted a ban on women in combat, stating that women can now serve on the frontlines. We in AF3IRM know that this is already common practice and that women of color and transnational women are already disproportionately over-represented in the US military. They are pushed into military duty due to poverty and lack of other options.

We do not celebrate this new “elimination of a gender-based barrier.” We do not celebrate sending us women overseas to kill other women and children in someone else’s name. (emphasis mine)

According to a study by the PEW Research Center, women now make up 14% of the enlisted ranks and 16% of the officer ranks. A look at the racial breakdown of those numbers is instructive,

While 71% of active-duty men are white (including white Hispanics), only about half of active-duty women (53%) are white. The share of white women in the military is also significantly smaller than their proportion in the civilian female population ages 18-44 (78%).

More than three-in-ten (31%) military women are black (including black Hispanics). This is almost twice the share of active-duty men who are black (16%), as well as more than twice the proportion of civilian women ages 18-44 who are black (15%). In addition, more women in the active-duty force than men in the active-duty force and civilian women ages 18-44 are of mixed racial background or some other race.

The share of Hispanics among women and men in the armed forces is similar (13% vs. 12%, respectively), and the share of military women who are Hispanic is smaller than that of Hispanic women ages 18-44 in the U.S. civilian population (16%). But the number of Hispanics enlisting in the active-duty force each year has risen significantly over the last decade. In 2003, Hispanic women and men made up 11.5% of the new enlistees to the military; just seven years later, in 2010, they made up 16.9% of non-prior service enlisted accessions.

Further,

More than eight-in-ten post-9/11 female veterans say they joined to serve their country or receive education benefits (83% and 82%, respectively). Fully 70% say they joined to see more of the world and almost as many (67%) say they joined to gain job skills.

However, there is one key difference in the reasons that men and women joined the military. Some 42% of female veterans say they joined the military because jobs were hard to find, compared with one-quarter of men.

The take away here should be that we need to take a good hard look at the ways in which we are failing these women in regard to job training and job availability in the civilian world because as it stands now, we are effectively asking the most disenfranchised among us to fight our wars, and this move only makes it more dangerous for them, regardless of rank and benefits.

It is also hugely ironic that Panetta’s announcement came the same day that Congress was holding yet another hearing on the intractable problem of sexual assault in the military. The truth is that women are more likely to be attacked by other members of our military than by any enemy. The New York Times’ Gail Collins makes the unfortunate suggestion that having more women rise in the ranks might,

make things better because it will mean more women at the top of the military, and that, inevitably, will mean more attention to women’s issues.

Sexual assault in the military is not a woman’s issue. It is an epidemic and a national disgrace that is a direct result of the misguided notion of militarism that posits that strength comes from asserting power over others. Militarism has never been good for women because, among other reasons, it places them in harms way by armies that rape and assault women as a de facto military strategy and because women are more likely to become refugees, unable to support themselves or take care of their families and placing them in further danger of physical and sexual attack.

General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff also makes the argument that more equality will lead to more respect and hence less sexual assault in the ranks, but the military is still a top-down power over structure and women who do serve in lower ranks will continue to be vulnerable. And let’s face it, we live in a country where Congress just failed to re-authorize the Violence Against Women Act and where we still don’t have the Equal Rights Amendment and the Senate has yet to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The disrespect of women’s rights, safety and well-being is a de facto national policy in the U.S.

It is being said that drafting women will inevitably follow and I am not in favor of that any more than I think drafting men is a good thing. Let’s be honest about the mission of the U.S. military. It isn’t to defend this country, there hasn’t been a war for that purpose in my lifetime. Instead we have repeatedly engaged in military operations for the sole purpose of asserting empire and domination.

If the purpose of the military was truly to defend the citizens of this country and make it strong, they would be protecting women from violence in their own ranks and in every city in this country. They would be building up our shorelines to protect us from the inevitable further flooding of climate change. They would be re-building our tattered roads and utilities and installing solar panels so that we do not depend on non-renewable resources (of which incidentally they are one of the biggest users).

But instead, our military serves as the global bully, taking swings at whomever we don’t like at at any particular moment, with little heed to the negative impact that has on us all. And every time there is a war, civilian women who live where the war is being fought are victimized. And here at home more money is poured into the military while social services, education and health care are desperately underfunded and for poor women and women of color we perpetuate the cycle that propels them to join the military for reasons such as getting an education and job training.

So yes, equal rights and benefits are necessary, but not at the expense of condoning a system that requires us to kill and destroy for empire and perpetuates a myriad of harms against women, against men too, and against Mother Earth. That is a false and harmful premise of equality that we must reject.

January 24, 2013 Posted by Fempeace on January 24, 2013 6 Responses »

Confronting Patriarchy Is A Pre-Requisite For Ending Rape

Jan 212013

What can we do to end rape? It is a good question and one that Lauren Wolfe asked recently on CNN and on Women Under Siege’s website,

…there’s a lot to try to end: global legal failings that allow rapists to commit crimes with impunity; attitudes that blame the victim, leading to suicides and honor killings; misogyny that conditions men (and women) to view women and girls as less than human, as objects to be controlled.

But there are ways we can change each of these circumstances—a man-made problem is not inevitable.

A number of thoughtful answers have been offered on Women Under Siege’s website (although I strongly disagree with Roseanne Barr’s dangerous suggestion that women arm themselves–the odds of weapons being turned on the women themselves or being used to kill someone else are unacceptable). While many of the ideas suggested can and should be done, the bottom line is that as long as we live in a patriarchal society, rape is going to continue.

Nowhere is there a better example of this than the U.S. military where despite numerous hearings, reports, commissions, etc. there is a huge problem with sexual assault and the military just recently made clear that they really do not intend to make changes in the way these crimes are reported that would make it more likely that these crimes would be prosecuted. And as I have pointed out numerous times before,

(S)exual assault has always been a de facto way of asserting military power over, and allowing a change in control over soldiers would open a significant pandora’s box of culpability for the military and for those who wield violence everywhere.

Add to that a recent AP report that sex is what gets many military commanders fired. Reprehensibly, the AP uses “sex” to describe both consensual and non-consensual acts, as if they are one and the same, which unfortunately, many men, especially those who wield power over others, seem to think is true.

At least 30 percent of military commanders fired over the past eight years lost their jobs because of sexually related offenses, including harassment, adultery, and improper relationships, according to statistics compiled by The Associated Press.

In the civilian world, it can literally take decades to get rape kits processes while perpetrators go free and the Senate has taken action to change this, but after the House’s recent refusal to re-authorize the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), I’m not holding my breath waiting for them to join the Senate in rectifying this huge human rights atrocity even though, as The New York Times quite rightly says, there should not be anything ideological to discuss about this, it is necessary and urgent legislation.

The point I am trying to make is this–we live in a country (and a world) where rape and sexual assault is allowed to happen by governing bodies that refuse to take action to stop it. And the reason they do so is the key stumbling block to ending rape, this year or anytime soon, namely that to do so would be to put a stop to a significant form of power-over and in a patriarchal world, that isn’t going to happen.

So if we want to end rape, we need to make some huge changes in how we do things. That the House refused to re-authorize VAWA is appalling, but even worse than that is the fact that more than 30 years after it was introduced, the Senate has yet to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and we still don’t have an Equal Rights Amendment in this country. Those two measures would go a long way in codifying women’s human rights in the U.S. and in rectifying the patriarchal structures that allow systemic human rights abuses against women. And that of course is also why they have languished.

Things like addressing the socialization of boys and educating law enforcement and the media about better ways to address sexual assault and rape is important, but for that to happen in a sustained and meaningful way requires far larger systemic changes and in the U.S. measures like CEDAW and the ERA would be a huge step in that direction because they would make women’s human rights a national policy.

It is excellent that Wolfe has raised this question because it needs to be answered and we need to let our elected officials know that it is a priority issue, not just in the U.S. but throughout the world.

January 21, 2013 Posted by Fempeace on January 21, 2013 Comments Off

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