Does Military Service Turn Young Men Into Sexual Predators?

[Magda Hassan]

The women I known during my years who have not been raped I can count on one hand.

[David Guyatt]

Bloody hell Maggie, that is startling. Really.

[Magda Hassan]

I sometimes wonder if I am one of those statistical anomalies but it seems to be similar for most of the women I know too. Is this my peer group and others are different? Possibly. I know it is not scientific. Only a few of them have bothered to go through the legal system so they wont be in the 'official' statistics anyway so I'm not sure how sound the figures are at all.

[David Guyatt]

I think I must have lived a protected life...

[Magda Hassan]

This is a good thing. I wish everyone could have a protected life.

[Ed Jewett]

Blasting a Hole In US Military's Stone Wall Hiding Facts On Soldier Rape

10 02 2011 [Before enlisting (you should not enlist at all), all women, as well as men, should be aware that the US military is a trauma-based enterprise. You will be traumatized in multiple ways before you get out, rape is possibly one of them. It is no coincidence that fully one-third of all female enlistees report being raped. The numbers on homosexual rape in service cannot be found, perhaps because of known "don't ask, don't tell" policies.]
Military's Restricted Reporting' Draws Fire

By John Lasker
WeNews correspondent
A Defense Department official says a new recourse option for victims of military sex assault is encouraging more to seek care and maintain privacy. Critics call it a military cop out that lets perpetrators go free and lets commanders off the hook.
(WOMENSENEWS)U.S. Army veteran Susan Avila-Smith runs the military sexual trauma advocacy group VETWOW, or Veteran Women Organizing Women, based in Seattle. Sadly, it's a group that numbers 3,000 and is growing.
Avila-Smith has been advocating for military sexual trauma victims since 1995, after the military refused to punish her Army ex-husband after he "jumped up and down" on her pregnant stomach and ended her pregnancy.
When she sought justice from her commanding officers, "I was told not to talk to anybody about it or I would be BCD'd, which is a Bad-Conduct Discharge,'" she said

Avila-Smith says of VETWOW's 3,000 veterans who were raped during their enlistment by a fellow soldier, nearly all told their commanding officers about the crime, in compliance with military law. Many, she says, described the backlash from the chain of command as worse than rape.
All too often, Avila-Smith says, commanding officers try to intimidate rape victims into silence. Commanding officers, who are judge and jury when it comes to indicting soldiers for alleged crimes while on duty, have also under-prosecuted military rape by ignoring a victim's accusation, for instance.
The result, she says, is that many who suffer military sexual assault say nothing and try to cope with the psychological aftermath on their own. A 2008 survey of 103 military sexual assault victims by the Government Accountability Office showed half never bothered to report the crime because they believed nothing would come of it and they also feared being ostracized.
To help change how the U.S. military deals with sexual assault committed within its ranks and its aftermath, Susan Burke, a highly-regarded attorney, will be filing a class-action lawsuit on behalf of military sexual trauma survivors next week. The lawsuit, which will be announced Feb. 15 during a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., will ask for both damages and changes in the military's practices.
Women's Military Roles Increase

Since Sept 11, which ignited two major conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and lesser anti-terror campaigns across the globe, such as in Africa, the Department of Defense, or DOD, has never been more dependent on female soldiers.
Today, women account for 20 percent of all military personnel, or 300,000 total, compared to 1970 when women accounted for only 1.4 percent. When troop levels in Iraq were at their highest, there were four times more women in the military than during the 1991 Gulf War. Women have garnered two Silver Stars for braverythe military's third-highest decoration awarded for extraordinary heroism while engaged in combat with the enemysince Sept. 11. Only one Silver Star had ever been awarded to a woman before in the nation's history.
Today in Afghanistan, Marine "female engagement teams"heavily-armed and in full gearare on patrol in the countryside to win over the hearts and minds of Afghan women. They're also checking the women for hidden weapons so to be less offensive to the sex-segregated rules of Afghan society.
But as more women enter war zones, the numbers of military sex trauma cases have risen, with women as the majority of victims. Military sexual assaults in war zones rose 26 percent from 2007 to 2008, and another 33 percent over the following year, according to annual reports from the U.S. Department of Defense.
Female veterans have been pressing Congress to take action on military sexual trauma since the Vietnam War, recharging their efforts following the 2003 Air Force Academy sexual assault scandal. In 2004, Congress mandated the Department of Defense to form task forces to address the issue and establish prevention strategies.
These task forces made confidentiality for rape victims from their chain of command a top priority.
Two-Track Reporting Policy

In 2005 the Department of Defense also created the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, or SAPRO, the military's first lead office to deal strictly with sexual assault. It soon initiated a two-track sexual assault reporting policy: restricted and unrestricted.
Restricted reporting allows the victim a new choice of bypassing chain of command. Instead of reporting the assault to a superior, restricted reporting permits a victim to call a sexual assault response coordinator on a hotline or tell a victim advocate, such as a chaplain or health care professional. Once a restricted report is made, advocacy and counseling is initiated for the victim, but an investigation is not triggered. The victim's identity is never revealed.
Unrestricted reporting sticks with tradition. Service members who desire an investigation along with health care services must notify commanding officers of the rape and who they're accusing.
Dr. Karen Whitley, director of SAPRO, told a congressional hearing that restricted reporting and the 3,500 soldiers who used it since 2005 represented "remarkable progress."
In a subsequent interview with Women's eNews she reiterated that.
"That's 3,500 people we feel we're helping that would have never come forward if not for restricted reporting," she said.
But there are several glaring drawbacks to restricted reporting, says Avila-Smith, and they're posted on a SAPRO-related Web site called SHARP, or the U.S. Army's Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention program.
For one, the assailant goes unpunished and is capable of assaulting other victims. For another, the victim continues to have contact with the assailant, even if he or she shares the same living quarter.
Struggling to Find Balance

"We've struggled with this but what we want is people to come forward and get the care they need," said Whitley, referring to an assailant's immunity from investigation.
To VETWOW and other related advocacy groups, restricted reporting has meant 3,500 alleged predators got away with rape, says Avila-Smith.
"Restricted reporting? It's a joke," she scoffed.
VETWOW believes the No. 1 priority is holding commanding officers accountable. That would mean that higher-ranked commanders or civilians trained in prosecuting sexual assault would have oversight of military sex trauma investigations of commanding officers and an equal or greater say when administering an indictment.
Other advocates are also championing institutional overhauls.
U.S. Army veteran Olga Ferrer is the director of A Black Rose, a nonprofit focused on military sexual trauma that's based in Melbourne, Fla. During the Gulf War, while stationed in Kuwait, she was alone in a shared shower facility when a male soldier snuck up from behind and raped her. She filled out an incident report to commanding officers, but when she sought out military police to inquire if they would assist with the investigation, they told her the report "had disappeared."
She is adamant the only way to end military sex trauma is to involve a civilian element.
"Every military siteoverseas or in the U.S.should have a unit or group, that includes doctors, nurses, therapists, that investigates sexual assaults and does not fall under the DOD or military," she said.
Restricted reporting makes Ferrer's anger boil over.
"The alleged rapist should immediately be removed from the victim's unit and the victim should also be placed somewhere else. They should not be working together, period!" she said. "The only one being restricted is the victim."
This story was partially funded by the Spot.us crowd funding site for independent journalists.

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Originally from Buffalo, N.Y., John Lasker is a freelance journalist based in Columbus, Ohio, whose work has appeared in Wired, Christian Science Monitor, Toward Freedom and the Buffalo News.
For more information:

Veteran Women Organizing Women:
http://vetwow.com/
A Black Rose:
http://www.ablackrose.org/

[Magda Hassan]

17 Victims Sue Pentagon Over 'Plague' of Sexual Violence


Feb 15, 2011 3:25 PM

Text Size

Andrea Stone Senior Washington Correspondent

WASHINGTON -- It may become a landmark case to force the military to take rape and sexual assault seriously. Or it could be yet another failed attempt in a decades-long battle by women to be accepted in the armed forces.

Seventeen veterans and active-duty service members today took the first step to determining that, suing the Pentagon on charges of violating their constitutional rights to serve their country.

They accused two secretaries of defense of condoning, ignoring and implicitly encouraging sexual abuse in the ranks in a 42-page complaint filed in federal district court in Alexandria, Va., which contains phrases like "f---ing whore," "bitch" and "troublemaker."
The plaintiffs, who include two men, come from every military branch. They charge they were victimized twice -- once by their assailants and again by the institution they served.

"The system is driven by rape myths," said Myla Haider, a former Army criminal investigator who was raped by a co-worker. The co-worker was later court-martialed in another case as a "serial sex offender."

"There is a pervasive attitude within DOD that any man might commit these types of offenses and therefore when these things do come up it is seen as something that is commited by a peer or just another soldier" and not taken seriously, said Haider, a plaintiff in the suit.

Such attitudes aren't new. Ever since the infamous Tailhook scandal broke out in 1991 after the first Gulf War, an unending series of investigations, congressional hearings, reports, training regimens and special offices have sought to end the problem that the acronym-obsessed service now has given its very own name: MST -- military sexual trauma.

Eleanor Smeal of the Feminist Majority Foundation, who has watched for decades as women warriors fought to be accepted in the macho ranks of the military, said the challenge in civil court "is necessary because so much else has failed."

As a Marine captain, Anuradha Bhagwati witnessed her own senior officers violate sexual harassment policies.

Cliff Owen, AP
Anuradha Bhagwati, 35, of New York, is executive director of the Service Women's Action Network. She says sexual violence in the military "threatens our national security."

Bhagwati is now the head of the advocacy group Service Women's Action Network. She says she has seen those violators "shirk their responsibilities to their own troops ... transfer sexual predators out of the units instead of prosecuting them, promote sexual predators during ongoing investigations and accuse highly decorated enlisted service members of lying."

She called sexual violence "a plague upon the United States military" that "threatens our national security by undermining operational readiness, draining morale, harming retention and destroying lives."

The stories told by Haider and other plaintiffs at a news conference this morning were harrowing. Among them:

• Kori Cioca, the lead plaintiff, said she was constantly harassed by her Coast Guard supervisor. After she made a mistake during a knot-tying quiz, he called her a "stupid f---ing female, who didn't belong in the military" and then spit in her face. After complaining to her superior, the abuse escalated to stalking, sexual harassment and ultimately rape in December 2005. Despite an admission from her rapist, commanders told Cioca if she pressed charges she would be court-martialed for lying and later faced retaliation.
  
• Sarah Albertson was raped by a fellow Marine who outranked her in 2006. Because they had been drinking alcohol, both she and the man were charged with "inappropriate barracks conduct," and she was ordered to "respect" her assailant. Commanders forced the corporal to interact with her rapist for two more years, suspending her security clearance and downgrading her work assignments because she took prescription medicine to cope with the trauma of being forced to live and work with her rapist.
  
• Rebekah Havrilla was an Army sergeant serving in Afghanistan in 2006 when she was sexually harassed by a supervisor and later raped by another soldier. She reported it under the military's restricted reporting policy. When she later saw her rapist at a base in Missouri, she went into shock and sought the help of a military chaplain. She said he told her "it must have been God's will for her to be raped" and recommended she attend church more often.
  

Most of the plaintiffs have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder or other mental stress problems. They charged the Pentagon with a "systemic failure to stop rape and sexual assault."
Cliff Owen, AP
Veterans Kori Cioca, 25, of Wilmington, Ohio, left, and Panayiota Bertzikis, 29, of Somerville, Mass., were both assaulted and raped while serving in the U.S. Coast Guard. They are among the plaintiffs suing the Pentagon over its approach to rape and sexual assault cases.


The suit names former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his successor, Robert Gates, for failing to "eradicate a well-entrenched misogynistic military culture that permits Command to scoff at rape allegations, threaten victims with courts martial and exercise unfettered discretion to decide to use 'non-judicial punishment' to penalize rape and sexual assault."

The lawsuit specifically cites Rumsfeld, desperate for volunteers to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, for granting "moral waivers" to recruits arrested or convicted of domestic and sexual violence. Despite a federal law making it a felony for such offenders to possess a firearm, he provided an exception to members of the military.

Sex crimes, it noted, soared 24 percent in the year before Rumsfeld's resignation in 2006.

Gates is charged with "failing to take reasonable steps" to protect the plaintiffs from repeated abuse. It notes that he directed the head of the Pentagon's Sexual Assault and Prevention and Response Office to ignore a congressional subpoena to testify and failed to create a centralized database of sex crimes as mandated by lawmakers.

The current defense secretary's "failures to act ... led to a steady and dramatic increase" in the number of rapes and sexual assaults, rising by 25 percent in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007 and continuing to increase at double digits annually since then.

"Sexual assault is a wider societal problem, and Secretary Gates has been working with the service chiefs to make sure the U.S. military is doing all it can to prevent and respond to it," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said in a statement.

"That means providing more money, personnel, training and expertise, including reaching out to other large institutions such as universities to learn best practices. This is now a command priority, but we clearly still have more work to do in order to ensure all of our service members are safe from abuse."

The lawsuit cited the Pentagon's own statistics that reported 3,230 rapes and other sexual assaults in 2009. Because the military acknowledges that 80 percent of victims don't report the crime, the real number may be more than 16,000.

Moreover, the complaint charges that the Department of Defense "fails to report conviction rates from courts marital, which is critical data needed by Congress to assess whether reforms are being implemented."



Still, the plaintiffs face a high hurdle.

Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said the facts as presented in the complaint are "certainly disturbing" and merit attention from Pentagon leaders. However, he said he is "skeptical that this case, as a case, will gain any traction" in court.

From a legal point of view, he said, it is a steep climb for 17 plaintiffs to argue for systemic abuses in a military of some 2 million people.

"I don't know that a culture of sexism and misogyny has ever been recognized as a basis" for suing for violations of equal protection, he added. "Not every sexual assault is a violation of equal protection."
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