Bringing the war home

Because the military is acting as both employer and judge, its authorities strongly prefer to attempt to rehabilitate offenders. Many sophisticated batterers who know how to work the system are often able to get off with no penalty stronger than a recommendation for an "anger management class."

Gwinn has seen many such repeat offenders who drift in and out of military counseling programs for years, until they do something off the base that lands them in a civilian court. "Usually by the time they get to us, they have already been though countless conflict management courses on the base," says Gwinn.

Meeting the demands of a soldier's job -- whether training exercises, or deployment to war zones like Afghanistan -- will often take precedence over making a counseling session. "For all we know, they'll be shipped out before they complete the program and no one will do anything about it," says Gwinn. "But if we have them in a civilian program, that's a probation violation and we can haul them in."

In the military, justice is dispensed by commanding officers who often have no training in domestic violence prevention or intervention. Such training is not mandatory for these officers, even though most of them will be the final arbiters in domestic violence complaints against their soldiers.

Many who study domestic violence in the military, including many of those on the Department of Defense task force, believe that training in domestic violence should be mandatory for all commanding officers. But others say that training will not be enough without clear judicial reform.

"It's not enough to educate commanding officers," says Gwinn. "You have to have sentencing handled by people who specialize in this."

Gwinn adds that in his years of working closely with the military, he has met "tremendous" commanding officers. And people on the task force tell him all the time that the commanding officer model of domestic violence enforcement is actually superior to the civilian mode. "They say, 'We have more control over people than anyone.' The commanding officer literally runs their lives."

Gwinn's response is that while it's a "noble goal" to believe in the supreme justice of a benevolent commander, "we have to legislate norms, values, policy. You can't build an intervention system based around the idea that a commanding officer will always do the right thing."

In his career so far, adds Gwinn, "I've seen commanding officers who say, 'Domestic violence offenders are wastewater, and I bilge my wastewater.' If some 19-year-old soldier has slapped his wife, and some off-duty cook M.P. is called to the scene, they could end up with a court-martial. And I've seen officers who have brandished a gun in front of their wife and children, and his commanding officer responded by saying, 'He's a good soldier. We'll do anything we can to keep the family together.'"

Although Hansen agrees that there are many good commanding officers, she too has heard horror stories from her clients about commanding officers who have done nothing, or even made the situation worse. In some cases, says Hansen, the commander might even be "a guy who's doing the same thing in his own house."

In one case, Hansen recalls, a soldier who had been accused of wife-beating told his commander that his actions were fair because his wife was unfaithful. The commander told the husband, "Well, if you can get a picture of them together, we can charge him too," says Hansen. A week later, the soldier was arrested by the local sheriff for stalking his wife, who had moved out, in a parking lot at the local mall. Soon after, he was again picked up, this time for sitting in his wife's bedroom closet with a camera in his hand.

"I can count on one hand the number of court-martials I've seen in San Diego for domestic violence," says Gwinn. "Compare that to the thousands of batterers who are convicted each year in our court system. And they should be convicted. They have committed a crime."

Gwinn points out that those who are kicked out of the military for domestic violence are overwhelmingly soldiers who have been convicted of criminal assault in a civilian court, which is in itself a serious enough charge to warrant dismissal. The civilian court may also strip the soldier of his right to carry a weapon by enforcing the Lautenberg Amendment, at which point he is of little use to his employer.

Gwinn remembers an intervention group for military offenders he attended in North Carolina. Two of the batterers in the group had been living off-base and were prosecuted under the civilian system. As a result, they had been charged with a criminal misdemeanor and kicked out of the military. The other five offenders, who had comparable charges, had been referred to the military's family advocacy system. All of them were still Marines, and their charges had no effect on their rank.

"Two of those five were really scary guys, very sophisticated abusers," recalls Gwinn. "But they got caught up in a different system, so nothing happened to them."

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