COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Leaving Military: Veterans
Why Male Military Veterans Are Committing Sexual Assault at Alarming Rates
Lucinda Marshall, Alternet
May 25, 2007
A recent DOJ report found that vets are twice as likely to be jailed forsexual assault than nonveterans.
A recent study by the Department of Justice
http://blogs. usatoday. com/ondeadline/ 2007/05/veterans _less_l.html found
that military veterans are twice as likely to be incarcerated for sexual
assault than nonveterans. When asked about the finding, Margaret E. Noonan,
one of the authors of the study, told the Associated Press, "We couldn't
come to any definite conclusion as to why." The intrinsic and systemic
connection between militarism and violence against women, however, makes
this finding far from surprising.
Sexual violence has been a de facto weapon of war since the beginning of
the patriarchal age. Raping and assaulting women is seen as a way to attack
the honor of the enemy, and women have always been the spoils of war. The
result is that many types of violence against women are exacerbated by
militarism, including the indirect effects on civilian populations both
during hostilities and after the conflict ends and soldiers go home. These
include:
* Rape/sexual assault and harassment both within the military and
perpetrated on civilian populations
* Domestic violence
* Prostitution, pornography and trafficking
* Honor killing
Examples are not hard to find. Before and during WWII, the Japanese
enslaved as many as 200,000 "comfort" women, and after the defeat of the
Japanese, the United States continued to use tens of thousands of Japanese
women as sex slaves. During the 1990s more than 5,000 women were trafficked
into South Korea primarily to work as "entertainers" near U.S. military
bases. Hundreds of thousands of women have been raped, frequently for the
purpose of ethnic cleansing in countries such as Bosnia, Rwanda and the
Democratic Republic of Congo.
In this country, sexual abuse within the military is often ignored. None of
the officers implicated in the Tailhook that involved the sexual harassment
of women were ever prosecuted. Sexual abuse problems at the Air Force
Academy in Colorado Springs have only been partially addressed, and the
murders of military wives at Ft. Bragg, N.C., and Ft. Campbell, Ky.,
provide shocking examples of the problems of intimate partner abuse within
military families.
A 2003 study reported that 30 percent of female U.S. veterans reported
being the victim of rape or attempted rape during their military service.
Last year there were 2,374 reports of sexual assault by service members.
Despite this, the military quit providing emergency contraception as part
of its medical formulary in 2002 (even while officially recognizing its
importance), and a recent congressional attempt to reinstate it was
scuttled due to lack of support (ironically, the erectile dysfunction drug
Levitra is included in the formulary).
As the above illustrates, this latest statistic regarding sexual assaults
by military veterans is clearly no accident. It a systemic part of a
military culture that not only tolerates but frequently encourages the
hatred and belittling of women.
What this study illustrates is that clearly the impact that militarism has
on how men treat women does not end when a conflict is over; indeed, the
effects of militarism during post-conflict periods can also be quite grave.
So-called honor killings have risen dramatically in Iraq in recent years,
with the most recent horrific killing of 17-year-old Duaa Khalil Aswad
because she fell in love with a man of a different religious sect. Honor
killings are a common tool for reestablishing a sense of control in the
aftermath of conflict, and men returning from "war" frequently transfer
their entitlement to commit violence from the battlefield to their own
communities.
While the military acknowledges the problem, it has also tried to cast the
blame on such factors as the relatively young age of the offenders compared
to the population at large and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But
neither explanation holds up in that this isn't a problem of men beating up
men. Nor is it a problem of female vets, many of whom also are young and/or
suffer from PTSD (99 percent of incarcerated vets are male), committing
sexual assault. It is a problem of men raping and assaulting women.
It isn't surprising that the DOJ feigns bafflement about these latest
statistics. For years now the problem of misogynist violence in the
military has been the subject of lengthy reports and hearings. Yet the
problem continues and with very good reason -- to cop an understanding of
the issue and truly remedy the problem would require no less than a
complete rethinking of the ethos of military violence and how it
exacerbates the global pandemic of violence against women.
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