Does Military Service Turn Young Men into Sexual Predators?
http://www.alternet.org/world/142942/does_military_service_turn_young_men_in%3E%20to_sexual_predators_/
By Penny Coleman
October 22, 2009.
"Everyone has the potential to be a sex offender. It depends on how
they have been conditioned."
--
Every day, for four years as a West Point cadet, Tara Krause lived
and worked alongside the men who had gang-raped her.
Still, she managed to graduate in 1982. She served as a field
artillery officer during the Cold War and was attached to the 518th
Military Intelligence Brigade during the Gulf War. In what she calls
"an act of incredible self-destruction," she married a three-tour
Vietnam vet in 1985 and, for the next eight years, lived "the private
hell of his PTSD."
"Suicidal behavior, violence and degradation were common threads of
daily life," she told me. She survived only because when he put his
gun to her head one day, it finally gave her the courage to flee.
"Like Lot's wife," she says, she struggles not to look back.
It's been almost 30 years since the rape, and Krause says she still
"dance(s) the crushing daily struggle" of her own PTSD: "The
nightmares, panic attacks, flashbacks, cold sweats, suicidal
thoughts, zoning out, numbing all emotion and desperately avoiding
triggers (reminders) -- I have become a prisoner in my own home."
Krause is rated 70 percent disabled by the Veteran's Administration
and has been in treatment at the Long Beach [Calif.] VA for the past six years.
For all the work she has done to heal her own injuries, she still has
no answer for the question: "How do you get a group of Southern white
teenagers, all of whom were Eagle Scouts, class presidents, scholars
and athletes, to be capable of raping a classmate?"
The question deserves an answer, and not a simplistic one. A 2003
survey of female veterans from Vietnam through the Gulf War found
that almost 8 in 10 had been sexually harassed during their military
service, and 30 percent had been raped.
Yet for decades, in spite of the terrible numbers, the military has
managed with astonishing success to get away with responding to
grievances like Krause's with silence, or denial, or by blaming "a
few bad apples." But when individual soldiers take the blame, the
system gets off the hook.
And it can be shown that the patterns of military sex crimes are old
and widespread -- for generations, military service has transformed
large numbers of American boys into sexual predators.
So it seems reasonable to ask if perhaps there is something about
military culture or training or experience that can be identified as
causative, and then, perhaps, changed.
The correlation is difficult to dismiss. The majority of veterans
behind bars today are there for a very specific type of crime:
violence against women and children. That fact has held true since
the first Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) surveys of veteran
populations in the nation's prisons in 1981, and there is evidence
that those surveys only identified a much older problem.
The orgy of demonization, however, that both fueled and justified the
disgraceful neglect of veterans in the aftermath of Vietnam makes
this an especially fraught issue to take on.
But -- without making any excuses for behaviors that cause
irreparable harm to those who are victimized -- there is little hope
of change unless the tacit complicity of military institutions and
culture is acknowledged. And that complicity most certainly did not
begin recently.
World War II is remembered as a crucible and a coming-of-age ritual
for the baby-faced boys it turned first into men and then into the
"greatest generation."
The butchery, the civilian atrocities, the summary executions, the
appalling racism and the breakdown of hundreds of thousands of
soldiers have been largely erased from communal memory. And so have
the rapes perpetrated by American soldiers on our female enemies and
allies alike.
In August and September 1944, when the fighting eased, French women
were raped by their American liberators at three times the rate of
civilian women in the U.S. And during the final drive through Germany
in March and April 1945, more than 900 German women were raped by
American soldiers, causing Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to issue a
directive to Army commanders expressing his "grave concern" and
instructing that speedy and appropriate punishments be administered.
According to Madeline Morris, the Duke University law professor and
military historian who uncovered that lurid fragment of history,
those numbers are almost certainly on the low side.
"Rape is particularly likely to have been undercounted because it is
less serious than murder," Morris explains, "it is reputedly the most
underreported violent crime, even in the domestic context, and it was
perpetrated in the ETO (European Theater of Operations) almost
exclusively against non-Americans."
Those women, especially German women, could not easily have found the
courage -- or the opportunity -- to file complaints.
The memories of rape brought home by World War II soldiers surely
changed their lives forever.
"What does rape do to the rapist?" is a question Krause has struggled
with for 20 years. "Somewhere out there is that Rotarian, happy
grandfather, son-done-good, solid citizen. Does he block it out, does
he remember, does he feel a shred of guilt? Is it truly done with impunity?"
It is important to note that during World War II, according to
Morris' research, patterns of violent crime in the United States'
civilian population underwent sharp changes as well.
"While civilian murder and non-negligent manslaughter rates decreased
7.5 percent from prewar rates, aggravated assault rates increased
substantially (19.9 percent), and forcible-rape rates increased
dramatically (by more than 27 percent) above the prewar average."
Similarly, since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, BJS
statistics show a 42 percent increase in reported domestic violence
and a 25 percent increase in the reported incidence of rape and sexual assault.
Except for simple assault, which increased by 3 percent, the
incidence of every other crime surveyed -- including violent crimes
overall -- decreased, but once again, mirroring Morris' World War II
data, domestic violence, rape and sexual assault showed daunting increases.
The first BJS survey of incarcerated veterans found that two-thirds
of those veterans had been convicted of rape or sexual assault. In
military prisons as well, the report noted, "sexual assault was the
most common offense for which inmates were held … accounting for
nearly a full third of all military prisoners."
That chilling aspect of soldiers' criminal behavior held true in
subsequent BJS surveys.
In 2000, veterans in state and federal prisons and local jails were
twice as likely as non-veterans to be sentenced for a violent sexual
crime. In the 2004 survey, 1 in 4 veterans in prison were sex
offenders (1 in 3 in military prisons), compared to 1 in 10
incarcerated non-veterans.
Chris Mumola, author of the two most recent BJS reports, points out
that "when sex crimes are excluded, the violent-offense incarceration
rate of non-veterans is actually greater than the incarceration rate
of veterans for all other offenses combined (651 per 100,000 versus
630 per 100,000)."
In fact, when sex crimes are excluded, adult male veterans are over
40 percent less likely to be in prison for a violent crime than their
non-veteran counterparts. The same holds true for property crimes,
drugs and public disorder -- the rates are much higher rates for
adult men without military experience.
"The one notable exception to this pattern," Mumola says, "is sex
assaults, including rape."
The Veterans' Health Administration has adopted the term military
sexual trauma (MST) to refer to severe or threatening forms of sexual
harassment and sexual assault sustained in military service.
Their records for 2007 show that 22.2 percent of female veterans and
1.3 percent of male vets (from all eras) who used the agency's health
services screened positive for MST. That represents a daunting
increase of about 65 percent for both men and women over the agency's
2003 data.
And the small percentage of men is somewhat misleading; the 2007
percentages translate into 45,564 women and 47,719 men whose injuries
forced them to acknowledge their victimization and to seek help from the VA.
Some of that increase can perhaps be attributed to a 2005
congressional directive requiring the VA to improve its rate of
screening returning soldiers for MST, but given that almost 90
percent of veterans don't (or can't) use VA health care services, it
seems safe to assume that the actual numbers are considerably higher.
Those are just the numbers for veterans.
In 2008, the Pentagon received more than 2,900 sexual assault reports
involving active-duty service members. That represents a 9 percent
increase from 2007, a 26 percent increase in combat zones. Almost a
third of those reports involved rape, and more than half involved
aggravated sexual assault.
In a dazzling display of unapologetic spin, the increase was called
"encouraging," an indication of more reports rather than more
assaults. It offered no evidence to back up that interpretation, save
that the department "encourages greater reporting to hold offenders
accountable for this crime."
That seems an unlikely incentive given that only 10 percent of the
2008 complaints led to a court-martial (compared to a civilian rate
of 40 percent). The rest received minor punishments, almost half were
dismissed, and the report acknowledged that 90 percent of sexual
assaults in the military aren't reported at all.
Rape occurs almost twice as frequently in the military as it does
among civilians, especially in wartime.
When a 2008 House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee
subpoenaed Kaye Whitley, director of the DoD's Sexual Assault
Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO), to explain what the
department was doing to stop the escalating sexual violence in the
military, her boss, Michael Dominguez, principal deputy
undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, ordered her
not to appear.
Only after the department was threatened with a contempt citation was
Whitley made available to the committee. She then sought to reassure
the members that DoD is conducting a "crusade against sexual
assault," and itemized all of the heroic measures the agency was
planning to implement in the very near future -- efforts that
somehow, despite explicit directives and deadlines from Congress, the
agency had not managed to launch at the time.
Tia Christopher, women veterans coordinator at Swords to Plowshares
in San Francisco, holds Dominguez, not Whitley, responsible for
flouting congressional directives.
"I heard him claim that the reason sexual assaults are so high in the
military right now is the hip-hop influence. I don't need to spell
out why I found that so offensive. I fault Dominguez for not
recognizing that it is a leadership issue."
Christopher loves the military and calls it "a really beautiful
machine" when it is working correctly. But she is a rape survivor,
and she feels doubly betrayed by her superiors in the Navy. "They can
respond to other situations, why not to sexual assault?"
Christopher was 18 when she joined the Navy, training to be a
cryptologist. The night she was raped, she had been drinking.
"Underage drinking," she notes, "is a big issue in the military. It
gets you an Article 15, and it's 100 percent guaranteed that you will
be prosecuted for collateral misconduct. It is far more likely that
you will get in trouble for collateral misconduct [from drinking
alcohol] than for raping someone. So I destroyed all the evidence. I
bleached my sheets and scrubbed myself up and didn't come forward
until two weeks later. I wanted to keep my military career, and I
thought I could just get through it.
"But I saw him every day. I mustered with him. He would follow me
into the chow hall and sit across from me while I ate. I stopped
eating, couldn't concentrate, started failing my courses. And I
started having flashbacks, hallucinating. I thought I saw him everywhere."
Christopher finally realized she needed help, but the female petty
officer she first spoke to got her chief involved and, as the report
went up the chain of command, her nightmare just got bigger.
"In my case, there were witnesses. They heard my head hit the wall in
the barracks room, but they were drinking [underage], too."
Her commanding officer promised them all immunity if they agreed to
testify on her behalf, and then reneged on the deal.
"It ended up that they all got in trouble, and [her rapist] got off."
(In 2006, Christopher's attacker was expelled from the military for
another rape.)
"The last few months that I was in the service, I was assigned to X
Division, mopping the stairs, cleaning the heads, picking hair out of
the drains. It was my job to vacuum the different chief's offices,
and these sleazeballs would say things like, 'Hey, Christopher, bend
over when you're sweeping.' Or, 'Hey Christopher, let me see them
titties.' When you come forward about a rape, basically you are just a slut."
Christopher left the military in 2001, and it took her a long time to
get her life back together. She still has panic attacks, flashbacks,
trouble sleeping. But, with help from a women's psychotherapy group
at the Seattle VA, and the rich support from sympathetic colleagues
at Swords to Plowshares, she has developed a lot of coping skills.
After seven years, and some good therapy, she feels strong enough to
manage her advocacy and policy work.
"I've testified before the California state Legislature, and I was
invited to testify before Congress. I speak out about MST as much as
I do so other women don't have to. This is not just my job. There is
no way I would ever give my clients to the media. I remember what it
was like, being fresh out of the service and going through that trauma."
Lisa Pellerin, who has facilitated sex-offender programs for the New
York State Department of Corrections for six years, believes that
"everyone has the potential to be a sex offender. It depends on how
they have been conditioned. When they are in the military, supporting
the brotherhood is the most important thing. Soldiers do what they
feel they have to do because they don't want to be seen as weak or
unable to perform.
"Sexual abuse has always been about power and control. If you are
exposed and desensitized to certain sexual behaviors, they become normalized."
One of the most basic conditioning strategies military training uses
to destabilize a recruit's inherent disinclination to kill is the
inculcation of a dehumanized enemy. Soldiers are taught that "we" are
the good guys; "they" are the "others." "They" are easier to kill
because they are not us. They are also easier to despise. "Others" --
the nips, the gooks, the hajis -- come and go, but ever reliable and
constant is "the girl."
Even in this new 20 percent female military, misogynist marching
rhymes (aka jodies) are still used, and drill instructors still shame
recruits with taunts of pussy or sissy, faggot or girl. Patty McCann,
who signed up with the Illinois National Guard when she was 17 and
deployed to Iraq when she was 20, still feels betrayed when she
remembers her drill sergeant yelling, "Does your pussy hurt?" and "Do
you need a tampon?"
A culture that encourages violence and misogyny, says Helen Benedict,
attracts a disproportionate number of sexually violent men: half of
male recruits enlist to escape abusive families, a history that is
often predictive of an abuser.
But whatever attracts them, and wherever they come from, this is
about a system plagued by rot, and not about a few bad apples.
American veterans embody the inevitable, predictable blowback from
that rotten system.
It is both unjust and disingenuous to focus on what our soldiers have
become without talking about what we have become: A society that
romanticizes its warriors, demonizes its veterans and devalues its women.
"Did I serve my full enlistment?" Christopher says. "No. But that's
because some shitbag sailor who shouldn't have been wearing the
uniform came into my life. Why is that my issue?
"This is a leadership issue."
--
Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life
after coming home. Her book Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,
Suicide and the Lessons of War was released on Memorial Day 2006. Her
Web site is Flashback. http://www.flashbackhome.com/
.
