The Scandal of Military Rape
What will it take to protect U.S.
servicewomen from sexual assaults and their subsequent cover-ups?
Congress, the parents of raped-and-murdered soldiers and embattled
military women themselves are desperate to know.
By Helen Benedict
Army Private LaVena Johnson, just 19 years old, was found
dead on her military base in Balad, Iraq, in July 2005.
At first the Army initiated a homicide
investigation, then suddenly, without explanation, closed it and ruled
her death a suicide by an M-16 rifle. Yet her parents said she had been
calling home every day, always sounding happy and healthy.
When her father, John Johnson, a veteran of the
Army himself, viewed his daughter’s body at the funeral home, he
noticed several suspicious factors. Her face was bruised, the gunshot
wound did not match the description in the autopsy and white uniform
gloves had been glued onto her hands. He later gained access to
photographs that showed abrasions to her face, a broken nose, burns on
her hands, signs of sexual abuse and more burns to her back and genital
area. He also learned that she had been re-clothed after her death,
dragged across the ground and set on fire inside a tent. Johnson and
his wife believe that their daughter was raped, murdered and burned to
cover the evidence.
The Johnsons have been pressing the Army to reopen
the investigation ever since, but so far have been stonewalled at every
turn.
Of the sexual assaults reported and recorded by
the Department of Defense in fiscal year 2007, half were met with no
official action, a third were dismissed as unworthy of investigation
and only 8 percent of those investigated were referred to Court Martial.
Of those few military men found guilty of rape or sexual assault, the
majority received punishments so mild they amounted to slaps on the
wrist, conveying the message that men can do what they want to women in
the military with little consequence.
In 2007, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs
reported that 20 percent of female veterans seen at its facilities
nationwide said they had been raped or sexually assaulted while serving.
Other veteran studies put the incidence of rape at 30 percent: nearly
one-third of all women in the military force. Furthermore, the DoD
admits on its website that 80 percent of rapes in the military are not
reported because women (and the men who are raped, too) fear ostracism,
punishment and loss of careers. The rate of sexual assault and rape in
the military is at least twice as high as it is among civilians.
As Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-Calif.) put it in
testimony last July, “Women serving in the U.S. military are more
likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in
Iraq.”
In fact, the atmosphere in the military makes
it a fertile ground for sexual assault and rape. Women are routinely
degraded from boot camp on with obscene insults, relentless staring,
sexist rhymes, pornography and sexual harassment. Servicewomen face the
most retrograde attitudes imaginable, while at the same time finding
themselves trapped in a rigid hierarchy that paralyzes their ability to
seek justice and punishes them if they try. “Rape is the only crime
where the victim must prove [her] innocence,” as Ingrid S. Torres, a Red
Cross nurse who was raped by an Air Force doctor while she was on duty
in Korea, testified at the July hearing.
This is not to say that no progress at all has
been made. Since Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and others demanded
reforms in the military in 2005, rape evidence kits, anonymous
reporting, victim advocates and training aimed at preventing assault
have been brought into the military. But these measures
are so irregularly implemented that they have failed to change the
dismal picture for women in any significant way.
“I’m going to keep fighting,” says John Johnson
of his daughter LaVena’s case. “I figure the person who did this to my
daughter has rank and prestige and the Army wants to cover this up to
spare themselves the embarrassment. And now so many people have
compromised their careers by participating in this cover-up.”
Rep. Harman and Rep. Michael Turner (R-OH) have
introduced legislation urging the Secretary of Defense to encourage
and increase investigations and prosecutions of sex crimes in the
military. Rep. Slaughter also reintroduced her
previously defeated bill, The Military Domestic and Sexual Violence
Response Act, which would create counseling and treatment programs
throughout the Veterans’ Administration, among other things.
But all the well-meaning reforms, meetings and
rules issued in Washington D.C will never have much effect as long as
military culture remains unchanged. So far, the behavior of the
Department of Defense and the Pentagon has only demonstrated, as many a
soldier has said to me, that the military is more concerned with
protecting their men from scandal than their women from rape.
The full text of this article appears in the Fall issue of
Ms., available on newsstands or by joining the Ms. community.
HELEN BENEDICT is a professor of
journalism at ColumbiaUniversity who won the James Aronson Award for Social
Justice Journalism in 2008. She is the author of the forthcoming book, The
Lonely Soldier: The Private War Of Women Serving In Iraq (Beacon Press, 2009).
http://www.msmagazine.com/fall2008/TheScandalOfMilitaryRape.asp
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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