One one end of the spectrum, you have dehumanizing language. On the other, you have stuff like this.
Spectrum
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This boogles the mind:
“…the Defense Department put up a Web site in 2005 designed to clarify that sexual assault is illegal…”
for ‘boogles’ read ‘boggles’
The first few comments to the article are just disgusting.
Makes me think the women might be better off getting their justice vigilante Bobbitt style. I could even see a logo “Sexual Assault? Cut it OFF!”
I had something like this (not nearly as terrible, mind you) happen to me in high school when a recruiter was trying to get me INTO the military. He came on really strong, brought me presents (and not just that “Army of One” stuff), told me that I would “have a good time” if I joined up, and even–on one occasion–touched me inappropriately. It was at that point I said, “Well, fuck this.”
Yesterday’s episode of Democracy Now has an interview with Helen Benedict (the author of this article), as well as two female soldiers–one of whom is a Native American woman with twenty years of service who had to go on welfare after leaving the military because her stipend was less than $300 a month. It’s well worth a listen.
http://www.democracynow.org/
As someone who attended university a stone’s throw from Canada’s Royal Military College, I am completely, utterly unsurprised. As much as people like to romanticize those in the military, we are not living in 1945, and the vast majority of the kind of people currently joining the military are not honourable gentlemen a la Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, and the training they recieve does not do anything but encourage this kind of mentality. It’s disgusting.
What’s really bothersome about this is what it says about how deeply embedded sexism is in the military.
I mean, think about it. There is *no* job in the military where one person might not end up saving another person’s ass in the right circumstances. Everyone is a target; everyone is at risk; everyone must care about everyone else because of that shared risk.
But the women are still seen as viable rape targets.
What bothers me most of all is what it suggests about the heart of the military. It’s clear that they’re not all about protecting and supporting each other if this is true.
The Fark thread about this story is absolutely appalling.
I know I shouldn’t be surprised, but phew. From the first comment it goes right for the rape apology.
To use a Fark cliche? DO NOT WANT.
*OUCH*!
“If this is true”?!
“Because this is true”.
Sorry; I think my brain went to sleep on me.
Red: Doesn’t surprise me about Fark, frankly. I think that I stopped reading them about four years ago, just as the 2004 race started heating up.
And I’m very glad that the mom of the soldier who was ostracized and punished for reporting her rape is fighting back.
Oh! A website! So much better than the 1-800 number that connected to an answering machine 3 years ago.
As a former soldier, I’m not surprised. I was either the “bitch” or the “dyke”, sometimes both if the males were sufficiently afraid of me as were a lot of the women I met while in service. A friend of mine was the “whore” because she went out with men.
That same friend would later refuse to report a rape because of the whole “soldiers vs. the officers” mentality. Another soldier was blamed for “encouraging” a male soldier that stalked her. Another was raped and then driven half mad by the rumour mill and it’s accusations that she had “betrayed a fellow soldier”.
Every post I was stationed at included the “beware of male soldiers” routine as part of the welcome wagon. I spent six months in Kuwait where I was encouraged to carry a knife because of the male soldiers. Stateside I recall one senior NCO (male) who tried to keep women off rotation because of the predation of them by male soldiers and bluntly stated this.
That the DOD thinks it can solve this with stupid campaigns and anonymous reporting of rape is absurd. It needs to address the real problem and the real problem is that the military has never done anything to address the often blatant sexism that occurs in the military. It, like its civilian counterparts, has adopted the “don’t be caught being female around males” stance and has made female soldiers responsible for the behaviour of male soldiers. That’ll fix it for sure, eh?
Bah. I am so glad to be out and away from all that. Sorry about the long comment, it just still drives me crazy all these years later.
I think back to this military history professor I once had (one of those who never served, so lives out some soldier fantasy in his studies, which were of the Civil War, and who was blatantly sexist in his classes). He said that women shouldn’t be allowed in combat roles, and probably not even in the military because — get this — the enemy would rape them. Forget the shooting! Also, forget that their own damn comrades are rapists. This is a form of terrorism all on its own.
According to the article, when commanders don’t tolerate rape and sexual harassment in their units, such behavior dissapears/diminishes. So apparently, too many commanders are aware of what’s going on, and do nothing to suppress it. It’s the “boys will be boys” excuse maxed out !
This part was chilling :
The latrines were far away and unlit, she [General Karpinski] explained, and male soldiers were jumping women who went to them at night, dragging them into the Port-a-Johns, and raping or abusing them.
If the author’s sentence is an accurate reflection of the General’s tone, its casualness, and the regular occurence of rape thus implied, is truly appalling. Sun rises in the east, male soldiers jump female soldiers and rape them.
Anonymous reporting? That obviously isn’t going to lead to punishment for the rapists, unless those doing the study are expecting those jerkoffs to have raped so many women they’ll have no idea who reported them.
Not at all related to this, but Piny, if you happen to be reading this, I have a trans-etiquette question, and because of the situation (at work, where I both seem like a bit of an authority figure and am not personally acquainted with the patron) don’t think it would be appropriate to ask the individual involved. I’d really appreciate if you’d either point me in the direction of an appropriate place I could ask, or perhaps would be willing to drop me an email?
I was reading those comments and all the apologists were going on about how it was a “stressful situation.”
Oh, that’s ok, then. You’re stressed! Go ahead and violate one of your fellow (female) soldiers, and ruin her life! I’m sure that she’s not stressed at all, being in the same situation as you. And I guess in that case, no one should be upset about all the women who are currently being raped and killed in Iraq. I mean, they’re LIVING in a war zone. They must be stressed too, right?
The fact that this problem largely disappears when the commanders don’t tolerate it shows the TRUTH behind rape: rapists don’t rape because they’re stressed, or because they want sex, or any other rape apologist reason. They rape because they think/know that they can get away with it. Once they realise they can’t, somehow the supposedly “uncontrollable desire to rape” just up and vanishes.
Posting this as “anonymous” for my girlfriend’s privacy, not my own.
My girlfriend is in the Coast Guard; her job is to do safety inspections on transport ships and in facilities. Over the past two years, she has been victim of rape at the hands of her coworkers twice. In both cases she had to face and even work with her assailants daily for many months. You don’t need the stress of combat to make the military helpful to rapists and detrimental to women (more so than other environs).
As a lesbian, this was even more difficult for her. This article mentions that servicewomen’s male “comrades” will allow them to be a “dyke” in their eyes but doesn’t mention their increased vulnerability as such. Military restrictions against LGBT people add additional difficulty to the already near-impossible task of successfully reporting a rape in the military with the impunity, privacy a rape victim deserves.
You don’t even need to be a lesbian to fear discharge under DADT; in all branches of the military women are discharged under DADT at a rate grossly disproportionate to their presence in the service (this rate is even higher for women of color). I’d guess that a lot of those discharges relate to sexual assault in some way; threatening to “out” someone as a homosexual should they dare report a rape or harassment is a very real and effective threat.
Mike Dunford (whose wife is in Iraq) took a look at the Salon article, and was not impressed. More specifically he took issue with the statements made by Karpinski.
If Mike is correct, and it seems so to me, it would seem that the article has a big problem with fact-checking.
This doesn’t mean that the problem described isn’t real (I believe it is), but it means that we should discard the statements made by Karpinski.
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