COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Women
Marine recruiters accused of rape
Marge Holland, World Socalist Web Site
21 March 2006
Two students from Mendocino High School in Northern California are
suing the Marine Corps in San Francisco federal court, alleging that they
were raped by recruiters. The lawsuit is the latest in a growing series of
accusations of sexual impropriety on the part of military recruiters
against minors.
Each of the young women is seeking $1 million in damages against two
recruiters in connection with the alleged rapes, which they said
occurred early last year in a recruiting office in Ukiah, California.
The recruiters named in the suit, Sgts. Joseph Dunzweiler and Brian
Fukushima, were both convicted and demoted in rank last year following
courts martial with allegations of sexual misconduct with recruits.
According to one of the accusers, "Jane Doe," she was raped three times
and told by the recruiter that she had to submit if she wanted to be
accepted in the Marines. She accused the Marine Corps of covering up
the incident, an accusation that was denied by Marine Corps Major Michael
Samarov.
This case, like many others brought against recruiters from various
branches of the military between 2003 and the present, has received
scant media coverage. According to The Objector, a web site devoted to
conscientious objectors, and the antiwar website Not In Our Name, some
of the other major cases are as follows:
July 2003: an Army recruiter based in Moreno Valley, California, was
sentenced to 16 months in prison for statutory rape of a 17-year-old
female recruit.
January 2004: a Marine recruiter based in Baltimore, Maryland, was
convicted of fondling a teenage recruit and was sentenced to probation.
May 2004: a Marine recruiter based in Blooming Grove, New York, was
charged with six counts of rape; the recruit was only 16 years old.
June 2004: a Marine recruiter based in Riverside, California, was
sentenced to five years in prison for raping a 17-year-old high school
student.
November 2004: an Army recruiter, also based in Riverside, was charged
with four felony counts of providing alcohol to and then having sex with
two 17-year-old girls.
March 2005: a National Guard recruiter based in Castleton, Indiana, Sgt.
Eric P. Vetesy, was charged with 31 counts stemming from alleged sexual
assaults on seven potential female recruits. Vetesy was jailed on
February 27, accused of sexually assaulting six female recruits—most of
them high school students he had met during the course of 18 months as
a full-time recruiter.
The recruiters victimize young women driven by economic necessity to
the armed forces as a means—sometimes the only one—of obtaining an
education and a well-paying job. Typically, the reasons the victims gave for
going along with the abuse was that they did not wish to alienate the
recruiters and therefore jeopardize their chances for a career in the
military, and many of the alleged assaults took place either in
recruiting offices or in military vehicles.
Also significant in fostering a situation of easy access to young
potential recruits is the effect of the federal No Child Left Behind
Act, which requires high schools—on pain of losing federal funding—to
give military recruits access to junior and senior students, including
names, addresses and telephone numbers, unless parents make objections
in writing. As a result, military recruiters have almost unlimited
access to high schools and students—access that no doubt attracts and
encourages the sexual predators among the recruiters.
The reports of sexual assaults by military recruiters is of a piece with
recent allegations that female soldiers in Iraq have died of dehydration
rather than risk sexual assault by male soldiers. There appears to be a
pattern of intimidation and unaccountability among not only the rank
and file, but their superior officers as well, who attempt to bury these
cases. For instance, in the case of the women soldiers in Iraq the cause
of death was frequently suppressed to avoid exposure not only of the
assaults themselves, but of the lack of disciplinary action taken with
regard to them.
Likewise, in the assaults by recruiters against female minors, the
military maintains its usual silence on the matter, aided by a compliant
media well aware that any honest portrayal of this abuse would call into
question the methods used by the military in its desperation to find
fresh fodder for the Bush administration's endless "war on terror."
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