That is *SO* screwed up.

Hey there, sorry to lurk. Just got linked and wanted to say something.

Why has the military been allowed to get away with encouraging this behavior, even if it's only to turn a blind eye? Why are they not educating about this problem at the boot camp level, and the officer training level? Are they, and no one is mentioning it?

I'm leaving for the Air Force this summer, so I have no first-hand experience on this topic. But I do know many people who are Active Duty AF right now. The military hasn't been ignoring it, and certainly not encouraging it. There's only so much you can do to keep the psychos from raping their fellow airman/soldiers/whatever service.

An Airman I know says you're briefed on sexual assault "probably 3-4 times in Basic, 3-4 times in technical school, then twice a year at your first base." So, yes, they do take this issue seriously, and definitely are teaching about it and making sure people know the consequences and whatnot.

I also do know that the DoD has SAPR, Sexual Assault Prevention and Response. I don't know too much on it, but I'm sure there's information there on their website.

:)

This. There is a world of difference in what the military tells people to do and what they institutionally act on. To expand on the comment: if you beat up a black person and call him "worthless" for being black, then you're discharged for racism. If you beat a woman and call her "worthless" for being a woman, then you're given extra duty for battery, or put in counseling for beating your wife *if* you cause a scene. And I'm not saying the military is perfect in their dealings of race issues, but institutionally they are trying a whole heck of a lot harder, and it is reflected in the percentage of people high up in both the officer and enlisted ranks who are not white. That percentage doesn't stand gender-wise.

This is going to sound strange, but if you just kick the "psychos" out, how do you monitor them unless you catch them committing another crime, if they were ever actually caught in the first place? Wouldn't that sort of be like releasing a repeat sexual offender without any notice to the general public?

It's a problem in keeping minorities "in their place" - when you don't view a person as equal because they can't do the same jobs, get the same benefits, or hold the same prestige, you can't think of them as equals in fighting at your side. After all, women in Iraq are not fighting at your side - they're serving as auxiliaries in non-combat positions, because women aren't capable of serving in combat as fighters.

I've unlocked a post I made a few years ago on Veterans Day. It was a very hard post to write, and it's still an incredibly hard post to read, but I think it says a lot about how the military really is for women, especially feminist women who go into it with their eyes open. I'm gonna try to lock comments, because I don't want to drag a debate into my personal journal where I feel vulnerable, but feel free to pm me if you want to discuss anything.

http://auroraceleste.livejournal.com/159922.html

Which is insane--not you, but the men who say this--because women are having to fight in Iraq, with their being no clear delineations between the front and the rear. The NPR aticle I first link to talks about these women, including one who is a heavy gunner for her engineering unit.

Yes, but even if the reality is that women are serving in combat, by Congressional Mandate women are NOT in combat. That difference affects women receiving combat pay (although the military has tried to give them the same benefit as "hazardous duty" pay) the jobs they can serve in, and the duties they can be assigned. Imagine, if duty in the Sahara is classified as "possible combat duty", then no woman can take that job. Do you think the men who get assigned to the Sahara (which, for the sake of this arguement, is not where many American men want to go) are going to think kindly of the women they used to work with who can't get forced to go there? Even if the Sahara is an "automatic promotion" job, they're still resentful of being there, so not only are women looked down upon for not being able to go to the Sahara, but they're also missing a key assignment that would help them move up. I think it is a lot of these small issues that builds into a resentment that the standard military *good guy* gets against women, or at least women who are serving next to him.

Do you think women should not enlist, then? Or push harder?

I dunno. Usually I make that decision on a case-by-case basis. Some women can handle the opposition. Some can't. Some can slide by oblivious to it for decades. Usually, though, I make more of a judgment call when a woman asks me based on whether or not I think they would react in a way *I* find acceptable. It might be harsh, but all those women who get pregnant to get out of deployment are only hurting every other woman who is serving.

I also hate to look at it in such a selfish way, but it is one thing that makes me really concerned about letting homosexuals openly serve in the military. Right now, if a woman REALLY wants to get out of service she can get pregnant and then be unable to make a proper parenting plan. That option is not available to a man. The only option for a man is "admitting" he is homosexual. I think that many men are going to resent women for still having the "out" when it has been taken away from them (I can only hope that the resentment will not extend to homosexuals themselves). I can't justify in my head that it is right just to deny homosexuals the option of serving just to make it easier for women who serve, but I won't lie and say that I think it will be cake. After all, it sucks that homosexuals have been denied serving for so long, but when they are allowed to serve I'm willing to bet my entire year's income that they won't be restricted from combat, set up lists of "non-homosexual" billets, or restrict what jobs homosexuals can hold and what they can't, so I'm a little resentful that women will still be restricted in those ways. Or maybe I have issues with homosexuality I need to work through, I dunno.


Have you tried to get it published somewhere? It needs a wider audience.

Thank you. I don't think it's complete, though, and it's very hard to work on because even reading it brings up bad feelings. Also, I still have a sister-in-law serving, and I'd hate for my actions to come down on her. So no, I've never pursued it, but I've never ruled it out, either. I am incredibly flattered that you are impressed with it, though.

Edited at 2010-02-02 01:36 am (UTC)

I'm afraid this doesn't surprise me much. "Thou shalt not kill" is such a basic foundation of our lives, & when you tell a certain group of people that they're exempt from that rule--& that they in fact must break it--I think it causes the deepest kind of trauma possible. It revokes your own humanity, really. And there are very few people (if any) who can stay sane under that kind of pressure.

I spent about a week with recently returned Iraq veterans last year, & the feeling I got from them reminded me of Jung's story about a patient who had been seduced by her brother & then went insane, believing that she was spirited off at night by a demon lover. Jung points out that incest is only permissible among royalty & the gods, & opines that his patient's delusion was a reflection of that--that she felt (unconsciously) that she'd joined the ranks of gods & queens, & was no longer part of humanity.

Basically, we're tearing the fabric of these soldiers' lives apart. Even Nietzsche, who thought so highly of himself, went mad trying to grapple with the moral vacancy that leaves. I think this sexual violence is a kind of insanity--or a symptom of it, at least. Most people who join the military probably have some affinity for violence--which is not necessarily a bad thing!--but when you combine that with incredible spiritual stress, I'm really not surprised that it breaks out in this kind of way. Terrible as it is, I have a lot of sympathy for the perpetrators as well as the victims.

(Anyway, sorry, I've been musing about this stuff a lot lately.)

I definitely don't think we should give rapists or abusers a free pass, inside the military or out of it! We're all responsible for our actions, no matter what the impetus for them is. (I know a writer who served twelve years in prison for running away with one of his junior high students. I don't think he was a bad person, then or now, but that doesn't mean that he didn't deserve those twelve years.) I just think that we should strive to understand the way outside forces act on people so that we can try to prevent them from happening again. I know the military already does a lot of psychological screening, but there's always more to know, or we wouldn't have these problems.

I read today that there were 300 suicides in the military last year alone. Everyone succumbs to stress in a different way, and some people are much more sensitive than others. (I was just reading about L.M. Montgomery's possible suicide the other day, & someone wrote that they couldn't understand why she was so unhappy when the traumatic events in her life were really no worse than what most of us go through. I should think it obvious!--how could the writer of the Anne books be anything but supersensitive? Most of us don't have hearts large enough to be broken that badly! But I digress--sorry!!!) Psychological screenings probably weed out a lot of people who couldn't stand up to the pressure. But like I said before, there's always more to learn--especially about psychology.

Anyway, I probably shouldn't be talking like this because I don't know as much about it as I should; but it's an interesting conversation, regardless! On Killing sounds interesting; I'll have to check it out. Thanks!

I think some of the problem really does stem from the process used to turn your average civilian into a soldier. Boot camp and training is designed, after all, to break someone down to their lowest possible point, expose their weaknesses, and reconstruct them in the military fashion. You're replacing the normal codes of behavior with an all new set of rules and behaviors. You teach them to kill, train them to respond to absolute authority, drill into them an "us versus them" mentality, structure their lives ... and more often than not, they still end up with free time on their hands. It's no wonder trouble occurs. It's a side effect of creating this military force, and it sucks. It's inexcusable, and horrible, and terrible, and it's there because sex is one of the few ways in which these bored, over-stimulated, over-stressed people can act out.

I have no solutions or answers, and I'm probably wrong in my analysis, but that's just what crossed my mind. My sociology studies covered the degradation rituals used by the military, and I come from several generations of a military family. Combine, and stir. I'm glad I never joined up; I have entirely the wrong mindset.

FWIW, I entirely agree with your idealized point of view regarding solidarity and bonding and mutual protection ... it'd be nice if it was true all over.

Sadly, it's what I've been hearing from women in the military for a very long time. :(

if you're not reading ginmar, you should be. She talks about all of this. She was sexually assaulted while serving in Iraq, by her superior officer. The very person she would have to report it to.

You're talking about official training versus unofficial attitudes.

Officially, yes, there is training in place to educate men about what not to do. There are programs to report the rapes and the rapists. They are insufficient but they do exist.

The problem is that the armed forces put a great deal of emphasis on being hyper-male: aggressive, tough, taking no shit from anyone, working loyally with his brothers in arms. There is no concept of "sisters in arms" or "bands of brothers and sisters."

Complicating matters is that women can be soldiers, but not, as the rules now stand, combatants. The rules are predicated on the mythology promulgated by the armed forces--that to be female is to be weak, overemotional, panicky in a combat situation, and ultimately useless. Even though most men in the service realize that all women are not like that, the myth that women are just like that survives.

And honestly, I don't think the sensitivity training does much good. Over and over in boot camp it is stressed that the the least desirable thing for a soldier to be "acting like a queer/girl/woman." To be sensitive is to be female, whiny, weak. So many reprimands from sergeants are misogynistic. I can recall an army sergeant yelling at sixteen-year-old me at a summer boot camp, "Are you a pussy? Are you a cunt? Are you a fucking GIRL?" He was very surprised when I looked down at my breasts, looked up at him, and said, "Well, yes, sir."

I've heard many men, now long past their time of service, who speak of women entering the military as "invading their territory" and "needing to be taught their place." Ask them what kind of lesson they'd want the men in their former battalions to teach their own daughters, and they look horrified. They are not thinking of individual people, but of an uber-class--Woman--that needs to be kept down.

My mother was in the service in the 1960s. Air Force sergeant. She always said she never regretted her service, but she did regret the way the men treated her--that she was taking the place of some unnamed and probably married man who had a much better right to be in the service than a single woman who should be home having babies and taking care of her husband. And not just her, but all the women on the base.

"The only other women they ever see, aside from the women in the service, are the whores in nearby towns," she said in one of the last conversations we had before she got sick and died. "And after a while, they start to treat every woman like a whore. Like she's just there to put out. And if she doesn't put out...well, they figure they have the right to take it. And it's not like anyone cares what happens to a whore."

It really shouldn't surprise anyone that men are raping women in the military. It's loathsome, it's appalling, it's nauseating, but it's not surprising. Men have been using their penises as weapons in war since the cavemen days. I'm not astonished that men who will rape enemy combatants who are women (which many have done, not that they talk about it) will turn things around and rape women--any woman--whom he sees as a threat, be it professionally, socially or sexually. If she is a threat to him or what he considers the norm, the way things should be, clearly she is the enemy.

I'm not saying that all soldiers act like this. Far from it. I've known women in the service and they've spoken well of their COs and the guys who served with them. But the atmosphere of the military is poisonous and pervasively misogynistic. That attitude says that while it's not all right to hurt your brothers, outsiders--the dangerous ones, the ones who change things by being here, the ones who don't belong, who aren't like the male soldiers--are fair game.

I wish things could be like they were for Kel in the Protector of the Small series. Kel had it rough, but she got respect in the end. Women soldiers and sailors in the real world are still waiting.

Edited at 2010-01-27 01:59 am (UTC)

My Husband has been serving as an Equal Opportunity officer for the last few years. One of his functions was looking into these cases while he was in Iraq. he also coordinated many talks and seminars on Sexual Harassment, and what constitutes it. You'd be surprised by what people don't know. There's a really awesome troupe by the name of Sex Signals http://www.catharsisproductions.com/, which goes around all over the country (and the world) to promote sexual awareness to college age kids. It's people like my husband who are helping to make a difference in those numbers!

Sick, twisted, and unfortunately unsurprising. I'm doing social work with women in the VA hospital in Chicago, and the things they tell me are shocking.

It makes me heartsore that my female friends in the military are not only dealing with the atrocities of war which they see on a daily basis, but also that they cannot trust their male comrades-in-arms. Some of the comments to this post get my points across much more eloquently and succinctly than I could, so I'll just say that they are definitely onto something.

Also worrying (to put it mildly) is the attitudes that these guys will carry over into the civilian world when they come home. And this type of attitude can be horribly contagious, especially when you are dealing with a group of very young men that are being forged into a cadre. One or two men in positions of influence on such a group can do a lot of damage.

If I were close enough, I'd give you a hug, because you must have needed one after reading that article.

I have a friend going to Afghanistan. I don't know when; originally it was February, but she keeps getting switched to different bases and troops (she is an EMT going to a place where they have a motto of one medic being worth five soldiers). I'm not even sure if there is a god, but I've been praying for her daily, because that's all I can do.

The world is screwed up. I want to believe it's getting better, but so many things are getting worse, and the things that are getting better are going so slowly that sometimes, it's hard to believe.

This issue was heavily explored in Helen Benedict's The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq. She included an appendix of groups & services that help soldiers deal with sexual trauma & also provide some other services. Most of that appendix is up on my profile.

I read an article a year or two ago about rape in the military, and had difficulty speaking to my brother for a while afterward. I never asked him if there were women in his unit, because I didn't want to know. I'm afraid that the answer would be yes, and I honestly don't trust my brother to have been one of the men who stands up for his female comrades.

The next time I see my cousin, who is also in the military and who I trust a good deal more, I'm going to ask him about it, and about what happens to the men that start this sort of thing.

Even when I was little, I heard from my (single and raising two kids while serving in the navy) aunt about how women in the military weren't treated as well. I used to think we had moved past that. It's depressing that we haven't.

The cousin I trust is a Captain so I was thinking that he might at least have received reports from women - not that I want to hear about specific stories or names, but just as an "in general" sort of thing.

Your brother sounds just like mine, except mine was Army.

That sucks for your mom. My aunt never talked about when she was pregnant in the Navy, though she did manage to carry both her pregnancies to term. I don't know if she was just lucky, or if her CO actually got her any support. I doubt it; she had horror stories about what most of her COs thought about her having kids at all while in the service.

A few years ago, an under-twenty-one friend of mine joined the military. You know where this story's going already. She went to a party with base friends, had a couple drinks, and her direct commanding officer--married with children and twice her age--raped her and beat the hell out of her.

When she went to the base hospital the next day to report it, she was told she'd be dishonorably discharged for underage drinking if she followed through with the report. The attending nurse also told her they saw this sort of thing all the time. And of course, my friend had to go back and deal with this guy on a daily basis.

When people talk about the military, I don't think about nice pretty boys in uniform or all these nice ideals of "freedom" and "justice" and "safety." I think about the free pass given to the few bad apples who know how to pick a victim. I think about a friend who almost killed herself because of how bad things became. Is it wrong of me? Possibly . . . but if a system's built to victimize its members, I'm not sure how I can see it any other way.

As foxifer said, but to add my own words:

That is soooo wonked up.

You say heartbroken, but I say enraged. To not be able to trust you own people. To be constantly on the lookout for people that would do you harm, in your own 'home'!