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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
During the last Gulf War, 8 percent of women sent overseas were sexually assaulted or raped, according to a study by researchers for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Other surveys of women soldiers have confirmed the trend: Sexual assault is widespread, and there are rarely consequences for the assailant. According to the Miles Foundation, fewer than 3 percent of reported assaults result in court-martials, let alone punishment.
That was Sheri Chance's experience after she was drugged and sexually assaulted by a Navy recruiter in February 2001. "The last conscious thing I remember is that I hit my head," she says. She woke up in the recruitment office in Peru, Ill., as the assault was underway. Chance reported the attack when she arrived at boot camp. After a one-day trial, the man who attacked her was fined one month's pay. Chance was discharged from the Navy. "When all of this started happening to me I thought I was the first. Now it seems like it was constant all the time," she says.
Over the years, the Pentagon has launched repeated investigations into sex scandals. When the first reports of sexual abuse of women serving in Iraq emerged, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered an official inquiry. Last month he appointed Brig. Gen. K.C. McClain, a female officer who investigated rape cases at Sheppard Air Base two years ago, to head a new Joint Task Force for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response.
But advocates say that such fact-finding missions are a substitute for real change. "We have known for a long time that there is a problem with sexual assault in the military. There have been more than 40 surveys in 16 years," says Carolyn Maloney, a New York congresswoman, "yet sexual assaults have gone up 19 percent since 1991. What is very frustrating is that the military has allowed these problems to get worse. What we have to do is to move past the acknowledgment that there is a problem and try to address it."
In recent months, women's organizations have pressed the Pentagon for reform, demanding amendments to military law to encourage prosecution for assault, and urging new procedures in the war zone. By the Pentagon's admission, the U.S. military's record on sexual assault -- from protecting victims and their privacy to prosecuting assailants -- is "inconsistent and incomplete."
In a report issued in May, the Pentagon noted that there was no uniform definition of rape or sexual harassment under military law. The military had also failed to institute widespread sensitivity training for commanding officers, or to make counseling services available to women who had been assaulted. It is not even properly equipped to investigate such crimes: In the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, fewer than 100 rape-detection kits (which collect crucial DNA evidence) have been distributed to field hospitals. The backlog for DNA testing in rape investigations is 16 months, and overstretched commanders are disinclined to investigate reports of assault.
That was the experience of Beth Jameson, a major in the U.S. Army Reserve, who was assigned to a large staging area in Kuwait. She was raped on March 20, 2003, the first night of the war, in the shower block during an alert for a feared chemical attack. In May of this year she told ABC television: "I donned my mask and my chemical suit, and my gloves, and my boots, everything. So I stayed there and waited for the all-clear sign to come about. Well, then all of a sudden there was a knock on the bathroom door. And the door opened and somebody said, 'Are you OK?' And I gave my thumbs-up, saying, 'Yeah, I'm fine.' And the door shut. And then, it seems like a split second later, the door just flew open and this person jumped in. He turned on me, kneed me in the groin and pushed me in the back of the bathroom. He pushed me to the ground and I fought with him."
She soon became convinced that the authorities were not interested in a prosecution. The investigators asked repeatedly if she had been having an affair with her attacker. She was also told that military regulations did not permit investigators to match the semen sample against the DNA registry of U.S. service personnel, which is maintained to identify remains.
Maj. Jameson told ABC: "I'm just angry now at the system -- the military system that won't protect the victim. I understand now why women don't bring forward the fact that they've been attacked -- because they're made to be the victim again."
