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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Irene Weiser, director of the advocacy group Stop Family Violence, compares the violations against servicewomen to the Abu Ghraib scandal. "Women service members are being brutally assaulted in ways that are every bit as dehumanizing and agonizing as the assaults on prisoners in Abu Ghraib," she says.
The report found that there are no standardized programs to prevent sexual violence against women, nor is there a senior-level person at the helm to deal with the issue. The military doesn't even have a uniform definition of what constitutes sexual assault, sexual trauma or harassment -- which, the report states, has created challenges when trying to report statistics and evaluate programs. (With more than 40 previous reports, one would think a definition would have been established.) The military's response to victims is severely deficient as well, according to the report -- failing to provide even basic medical care, such as testing for HIV, rape evidence kits and proper counseling for victims. Other troubling findings include a lack of confidentiality for victims and a failure to sufficiently prosecute attackers, allowing them not only to walk free but to work in the same environs as their victims. This is especially so in combat, the report says, where there are "heavy investigative workloads and insufficient on the ground resources." The task force does address the lack of confidentiality, but advocates say that immediate provisions must be made so victims' privacy will be safeguarded and other troop members who have been sexually violated will feel comfortable enough to come forward.
"If a woman reports, it's the peers who get her in trouble. It's never a stranger who commits sexual assault -- it's always someone they know, someone who they've been drinking with. It's usually the peers who say, 'Shut up and don't get him into trouble,'" says Lory Manning, who directs the Women in the Military Project at the Women's Research and Education Institute.
Prosecutions must be expedited as well, so that the accused attacker is immediately removed from the victim's surroundings, argue advocates. "They have to immediately remove the sexual perpetrator from the scene. One woman said that every day she had to salute the man who raped her," says Slaughter.
Ever since Bill Clinton opened up 90 percent of military jobs to women in 1994, over 15 percent of troops in Iraq are women. That means more than 212,000 females are currently serving in the military. Despite this, the "boys will be boys" mentality that allows for sexually abusive behavior to go unpunished is still very much intact in the military. According to Duke University law professor Madeline Morris' 1998 essay "By Force of Arms," published in the Duke Law Journal, the crime with the highest rate in the military is rape. "The ratio of military rape rates to civilian rape rates is substantially larger than the ratio of military rates to civilian rates of other violent crime," writes Morris. "Masculinist elements of the military culture should be replaced by an ungendered vision ... integrated units would have to be carefully shaped as a band of brothers and sisters," writes Morris.
Slaughter, who says Congress is researching a bill to implement more direct changes in the military, agrees that it's the culture that needs overhauling: "It's a culture of competition. We heard from many women who say that's the issue -- one way to put an uppity woman in her place is to sexually assault her, humiliate her."
The tortures in Abu Ghraib and the sexual abuse against servicewomen within the ranks may be connected because it stems from a military culture that allows for sexualized abuse. Says Kate Summers, "There are definitely intersections between the sexual assault in Abu Ghraib and the abuse against women -- which is the gendered violence, as well as the issue of leadership response."
But advocate Weiser is careful to separate the issues, noting that the sexual assault against servicewomen was a failure in leadership, whereas Abu Ghraib was an issue of leadership encouraging and authorizing that kind of abuse. Still, she retorts, "Maybe after 15 years of reports that go nowhere, the first action that is needed is to send our women service members digital cameras."
