Thursday, May 15, 2008
The Air Force Academy's new hard-line policies will curb rape and harassment -- but they don't do enough to protect the victims.
Apr 18, 2003 | With one Pentagon investigation complete, two more underway, and a fourth still pending, an Air Force "implementation team" arrived here this week to initiate changes designed to end a sordid history of cadet rapes and leadership indifference that broke in the media several months ago. The team has orders to literally transform campus culture, leaving intact the tools necessary to "cultivate a warrior spirit," while purging elements that helped create a climate of sexual harassment and assault that goes back at least a decade.
The blueprint for the operation, called the Agenda for Change, takes on half a century of entrenched military tradition, and toppled two key symbols of the old regime right away. In a surprise move, the Pentagon sacked the senior leadership of the academy -- both generals and two top colonels -- and then removed the enormous sign that commanded "BRING ME MEN ..." from the center of campus, leaving a naked granite wall in its place.
Both steps stunned the inhabitants of this sequestered compound, who were still reeling from months of media coverage about cadet rapes and the botched investigations that followed. But faculty members, cadets and military scholars, impressed as they were by the scope and breadth of the proposed changes, are not convinced that the academy's culture can be cracked -- even by 49 bullet points of reform and new leadership. And rape counselors have no doubt: The agenda overlooks key aspects of victim psychology -- above all, the need for confidentiality -- necessary to make the academy safe for its students.
"The first or second question from the victim is nearly always 'Is this confidential? Will you call the [military leadership]?'" says Christine Hansen, founder of the Miles Foundation, a national nonprofit dedicated to victims of domestic abuse in the military. "If they don't establish confidentiality immediately, the victim is out the door."
For its part, the Air Force chose a response -- swift and hard-hitting -- that tackled the basic charges: that crimes had occurred in the ranks and the perpetrators escaped prosecution and discipline. With military precision, the Agenda for Change addresses the issue of finding and neutralizing the enemy, leaving more ephemeral and emotional issues to work themselves out. While well-intended, say critics of the reforms, they are too official and too narrowly focused for the intimate and emotionally complex crime of rape.
And yet the change that victims' advocates are seeking -- for the Air Force to relinquish primary control over cases of sexual assault -- is regarded as equally unrealistic in a community where control and loyalty must be total for complete success.
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Since the first public report of sexual attacks at the academy appeared in January in Westword, a scrappy Denver-based weekly, Pentagon investigators have learned of 56 cases of sexual assault, and acknowledged that academy leadership mishandled some of them. Congress has presided over weeks of hearings on the scandal, and early this month, Sens. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., and John McCain, R-Ariz., tore into Air Force Secretary James Roche for defending academy leaders that he reassigned as the crisis exploded in the media. The Senate has since authorized a fourth, independent team, to be appointed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to assign blame for the crisis, even as the implementation team begins its mission to bring specific reforms to campus.
Those reforms go to the essence of academy doctrine -- loyalty and its expression within the corps -- to stress personal responsibility, eliminate opportunities for intimidation and humiliation, and promote open communication, despite longstanding codes of silence. In specific, the changes propose beefing up adult oversight and weakening the student chain of command -- stripping sophomores of authority over freshmen, for instance. Taken together, the reforms suggest an ambitious and thoroughgoing overhaul of academy structure that took professors, cadets and military scholars by surprise.
"If this had been a one-page document saying 'zero tolerance' that a commander could read one morning in front of formation, then I would have been disappointed," said professor Melissa Embser-Herbert, a sociologist specializing in women in the military and author of "Camouflage Isn't Only for Combat: Gender, Sexuality, and Women in the Military." "The fact that it's fairly detailed and conveys that someone put a lot of thought into this thing should convey that, 'We're not just doing something to please Congress.'"
A sign of the Air Force's seriousness was its willingness to suggest changes that affect the guiding principle of the academy model -- the same principle employed at West Point, the Naval Academy, and the services' officer candidate training schools. That approach has been to overwhelm the cadet with so much stress, from so many different angles, that he or she cannot possibly overcome them individually. "They artificially create crises to make people work together," says professor Lance Janda, a military historian specializing in women in the military. He spent five years researching the book "Stronger than Custom: West Point and the Admission of Women."
Because military doctrine since World War II holds that men and women in battle do not fight to stay alive -- they fight to keep their comrades alive -- the concepts of "unit cohesion" and "esprit de corps" take on religious significance to combat commanders. In an effort to produce model soldiers, the academies drive these concepts to the extreme. They have been successful at instilling group cohesion; but, as demonstrated by the rape crisis, they eventually suffered from their own success.
"Once the group pulls together, when an individual does the wrong thing" -- rapes a junior cadet for instance -- "the instinct is to say 'My loyalty to the group means I have to cover for this individual,'" Janda says. Faced with crisis, the group circles the wagons, and anyone threatening a group member becomes the enemy -- including a member of the group.
In this climate, a rape accusation threatens not only a group member, it also tarnishes the integrity of the unit. This plays right into another core concept at the academies: the constant indoctrination that cadets are elite, special, superior to civilians. The prospect of a rapist in their ranks threatens to shatter the group's reputation. "We are members of the profession of arms, the noblest of professions" wrote incoming Commandant General John Weida to cadets last week in an introductory e-mail titled "Getting Started."
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