INSTITUTIONALIZING SEXUAL AGGRESSION IN THE MILITARY

By Stan Goff

Part 1
The Numbers

“If the occurrence of rape were audible, its decibel level equal to its frequency, it would overpower our days and nights, interrupt our meals, our bedtime stories, howl behind our love-making, an insistent jackhammer of distress. We would demand an end to it. And if we failed to locate its source, we would condemn the whole structure. We would refuse to live under such conditions.”

-Patricia Weaver Francisco
Telling: A Memoir of Rape and Recovery

The military in a liberal state “appears as first glance a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties.” Especially legal subtleties. This is particularly true when we begin to view the military through the lens of gender.

One of the other unfortunate subtleties of liberal society is that people like ex-cops, ex-soldiers, and other figures of (male) authority, who have broken with their own pasts, can publicly ‘authorize’ certain viewpoints that are marginalized when those same viewpoints are expressed by the people who are most affected by them.

Many of the issues I will touch on in talking about sexual aggression, and the military propensity to absorb, conceal, and sidetrack interrogations into its outrageous institutional misogyny, have already been raised by women who have been affected by this misogyny and by women who advocate for women generally. Their work is herein recognized as having gone before this, and as making this critique possible. My conclusion, that there is a better chance in the military of legally redressing rape than there is in the civilian sector, is not original, because it is only taking this prior work of others another step.

Before I explore these subtleties, I want to review the process of public discovery that opened the military up to these kinds of interrogations, and a few basic statistics to establish a superficial context that is recognizable to most.

Most of us who are over 35 remember the Tailhook Scandal. In September 1991, when I was – if I recall correctly – with 7th Special Forces training Honduran troops to conduct airmobile operations in the day and pulling bad teeth while I was drunk in exchange for chicken dinners at poor Hondurans’ homes in the evening, there was a party of Naval Aviators at the Las Vegas Hilton hotel that would eventually result in the early retirement of Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Frank B. Kelso II.

Kelso had attended the 35th Annual Tailhook Symposium in Las Vegas – which was a traditional bacchanalia for this fraternity of Naval Aviators. He claimed under oath that he had not observed the activities that aimed a klieg light into the convention’s activities, but a dozen witnesses rebutted his claim.

The activities, which might be described generally as a binge-drinking party, included the sexual harassment and assault of 26 women, which journalists hastened to point out included 14 female commissioned officers (as if the offense was less egregious for mere enlisted women or civilians).

Women were pushed into a gauntlet of drunken male aviators, the latter proceeding to push their hands up the women’s skirts, clutch their breasts, pinch their buttocks, and rip at their clothes. When Lieutenant Paula Coughlin filed formal charges and brought the bacchanalia into the light of day, additional women came forward, 83 in all, to describe similar experiences they had had when attending Tailhook Conventions in the past.

To make a long story short, a press scandal ensued, while the Navy did damage control, issuing written reprimands of various degrees of severity, and filing not a single charge against the 117 perpetrators – partly, it must be pointed out, because trials of the junior officers would have quickly resulted in inquiries about the knowledge and acquiescence of senior officers throughout the Navy who had been aware of this annual party for years – in fact, many had themselves participated in their youths.

The Navy made loud public noises of outrage and concern – much as the Department of Defense did recently when photographs exposed the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib. They were “shocked, shocked that there is gambling in this establishment.”

Mandatory “sensitivity training” was implemented, a typically superficial and clueless military response, wherein every service member was to be familiarized with the narrowly legal definitions of “sexual harassment” and rape.

After an interval, counter-attacks began on “political correctness,” the damage this “gutter reporting” had done to good order and discipline (the military loves these high-flown and slippery phrases), and of course to the thorny problems associated with putting women in the military.

Paula Coughlin was subjected to a steady and plausibly-deniable psychological battering in the Navy until she herself resigned her commission in 1996.

Last year, when the Abu Ghraib crisis came data-streaming out of our boob tubes, we were treated to the now-memorized tiny handful of photos – photos showing a woman gloating over dead bodies and a woman holding male prisoners on a leash. In June, 2004, Zillah Eisenstein would describe these women as “gender decoys.” Everyone knows the name of the sketchy Ms. Lyndie England these days, and they have all but forgotten the name of her lumpen-Svengali, Charles Graner, who was a creepy civilian prison guard with a history of abuse before he took up the uniform to become part of the ironically named Operation Iraqi Freedom.

According to the Red Cross, there are hundreds and hundreds of photos that the Department of Defense is withholding from the public now, hoping against hope that no one obliges them to expose them – ever – that show the treatment of women Iraqi prisoners, by men. These photos include rape. The stories that are behind these photos have been widely supported and substantiated by independent investigators. In the famed Taguba Report from the Army, rape was not called rape. It was referred to as guards “having sex with” female detainees – implying that there was some element of consent. Stories also emerged from Abu Ghraib were of gang rape committed against female detainees. Most of the women detainees were not suspected of anything as a pretext for rounding them up, but were imprisoned as potential “bargaining chips” to get at relatives whose names were on the now questionable lists of the US forces.

“Masculinist depravity, as a political discourse, can be adopted by males and/or females. It is all the more despicable that the Bush administration used the language of women’s rights to justify the bombs in the Afghan war against Taliban practices towards women; and then again against the horrific torture and rape chambers under Saddam Hussein. And it should be no surprise that Bush’s women – Laura, Mary Matalin, and Karen Hughes – who regularly bad-mouth feminism of any sort were responsible for articulating this imperial women’s rights justification for war. Imperial(ist) feminism obfuscates the use of gender decoys: women are both victims and perpetrators; constrained and yet free; neither exactly commander or decoy. What if rape and `sexual humiliation’ are understood not as aberrations in war but as simply `a form of war by other means’?

“There is then a different context for seeing the disorder and chaos in Iraq that leaves many women barricaded in their homes fearing rape and capture if they venture onto the streets. It also puts a different lens on the recent charges of sexual assault and rape by dozens of U.S. servicewomen in the Persian Gulf area against their fellow soldiers.”

-Zillah Eisenstein

This was the story that had only received a whiff of coverage – that by June of 2004, 112 cases of sexual assault and rape had been reported within CENTCOM by female US troops identifying fellow male soldiers and officers as the perpetrators. The Miles Foundation says that number rockets to 243 if you include Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Bahrain.

This is only the latest manifestation of sexual aggression within the military. Since Tailhook, there have been 17 major sexual assault scandals that have leaked beyond the Department of Defense containment apparatus, including the now infamous case of the Air Force Academy’s rape culture, in which 68% of the female cadets polled had prior experience with various forms of sexual aggression and hostility, and in addition to the 2002 stories of military spousal murders in Fort Bragg.

Captain Jennifer Machmer, a West Point graduate was raped in Kuwait in 2003 by a senior NCO.

“I reported the rape within 30 minutes,” she explained in to a silent Congressional committee, “then watched my career implode.” Her assailant, however, was promoted and transferred to Kentucky to finish his career. The military had employed a narrow definition of rape under military law to exonerate the assailant. The same circumstances in civilian law would have resulted in a rape conviction. The military then uses the oblique method for shedding those who are not “team players” – the evaluation report. These are notoriously subjective instruments in the hands of every commander with which the withdrawal of a single point below the maximum – after an initial Officer Evaluation Report – will result almost certainly in being “passed over” for promotion in a cannibalistic up-or-out officer personnel management system.

It is this centralized institutional power, in a macho military culture, combined with the inability of service members to leave the military at will, that makes under-reporting of sexual aggression statistics for the military – which I will present further along – even more prevalent than the under-reporting of civilian sector statistics. Moreover, military sexual aggression victims are not entitled under the Uniform Code of Military Justice to confidentiality, which further inhibits women (and some men) from reporting sexual aggression – be it harassment, assault, or rape. Military personnel prior to 1999, under Military Rules of Evidence 501(d), could not invoke doctor-patient privilege, called the Jaffee privilege in civilian law, with regard to communications with their own psychiatrists and psychologists. Since then, even with an executive order to the contrary from the Clinton White House, the military has not fully implemented the reversal of this policy.

In January of this year (2005), Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness David Chu announced that confidentiality would be extended to medical providers and post-trauma counselors, though implementation is waiting on a green light from the Office of General Counsel. These changes were in direct reaction to the outcry raised – though feebly echoed by the press – about sexual assaults and rapes in Iraq and Kuwait. This does not necessarily signal real change.

The following examples of inaction and stonewalling were presented to Congress in 2003:

“Talia was sexually assaulted by a fellow soldier while deployed in the Persian Gulf. She was, belatedly, flown back from her unit for medical leave and long term counseling to cope with rape trauma. The rape evidence kit was turned over to local police for DNA analysis due to a backlog of six months or more. She has been unable to obtain information relative to the status of the investigation due to transfers and reassignments of military criminal investigators.”

“Kelsey was sexually assaulted by an escort while serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom. She has received no immediate or subsequent medical treatment for an injury occurring during the assault. She has not received testing for STDs, HIV and/or pregnancy. She will engage testing facilities and counseling with civilian authorities in the near future.”

“Angie was sexually assaulted by a colleague while being transported between units. She was driven to a secluded place. She was threatened with charges of adultery and fraternization upon reporting the assault.”

“Lisa was sexually assaulted by a male soldier following his viewing of pornography with fellow service members. She received medical attention from medics at a combat support hospital. She has not received counseling for the trauma. She has been denied access to attorneys until her return from theater.”

This kind of inaction and stonewalling might easily be attributed, by more legalistically disingenuous types, to individual offenders in the chain of command. The Department of Defense, however, contracted with retired Lieutenant Colonel Charles P. McDowell in the 1980s to develop a “rape allegation checklist,” that he then proceeded to distribute the list to selected officers throughout the military for almost a decade – with training on how to use it. The purpose of this checklist, which many women’s advocates now refer to as the “permission to rape” checklist, was to reduce the number of successful prosecutions of rape in the military.

“Training on the checklist was generally highly guarded and restricted only to specific audiences,” explains the PTSD Alliance. “For example, only certified police officers or District Attorneys were allowed to register at one training which was co-sponsored by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Even psychologists, psychotherapists, victim advocates and rape crisis counselors were not authorized nor allowed to be in attendance at this training.”

McDowell himself had expressed his belief that most allegations of rape were false before he contracted himself out to the DoD. He began his classes with the completely unsupportable claim that 60% of all reported rape claims are false, and said that when rape did occur it was really “courtship behavior gone awry.” He divided rape claimants into three categories: “N, S, and I personality-types,” meaning, narcissists, sociopaths, and immature, impulsive, or inadequate. The FBI’s own data has long shown that false claims of rape constitute no more than 3% of total claims.

This makes the claim by the military of having reduced the incidence of sexual aggression by half since the 1950s very questionable. The goal seems to be to reduce the claims without doing much to change the culture that promotes sexual aggression, while marginalizing and even punishing the women who report it.

Danielle…

“…was stationed with her Fort Lewis, Wash., unit at Camp Udairi, about 15 miles from the Iraqi border, for training before deployment to Iraq. She had just finished guard duty at 2:30 a.m. and was stepping into the latrine on the edge of camp when she was hit on the back of her head and knocked unconscious, she said.

“She recalled waking to a man raping her: He had tied her hands with cord, stuffed her underwear into her mouth and wrapped cord around her head, as well. He used a knife to slice off her clothes, cutting her in the process. She was blindfolded. When she began to fight, he threatened to cut open her crotch. He then hit her with an object between the eyes, again knocking her unconscious.

“When she awoke, the man, who remains unidentified, had left. Danielle said she ran, naked, bleeding and gagging, into camp. A fellow soldier cut the cords binding her hands and mouth and put his coat around her before waking her commanders.

“She was driven to an aid station, where a rape examination was performed.

“She received no other treatment for the injuries to her head, back and knees, she says. After the exam, a commander drove her to another camp, where she was allowed to stay. She was interviewed for about three hours, she said.

“For the first few days, Danielle said, a fellow woman soldier from her old camp remained with her. Then the woman had to leave to resume training, and Danielle was left alone. Requests to see the chaplain were denied, and she was not given counseling for sexual trauma.

“An investigator scheduled a polygraph exam for her but never followed through. ‘I was hysterical,’ she recalled. ‘There I am, all bruised up and beaten, and somebody in my chain of command wanted me to take a test.’

“After several more days in isolation, she overdosed on anxiety medication and was hospitalized. Involvement of family and lawmakers enabled her to return to the United States.

“Within days of her return, she said, her commanders at Fort Lewis told her to get back to work, even though she still suffered from migraines, blurred vision and pain from back and leg injuries from the assault. Smith, her civilian advocate, intervened, and Danielle was granted leave.”

Department of Defense estimates, gleaned from their own surveys, suggest that 3-6% of women in the military experience sexual harassment, assault, or rape. But surveys conducted outside the military of women veterans show that almost a third of the women in the military are victims of attempted or completed rape during their service, and of that number 37% are raped by multiple perpetrators. Three quarters of these women said that they did not report these assaults.

Having pointed at the military statistics of sexual aggression, let’s examine the more general statistics in American society. One in four women in our society is sexually assaulted before her eighteenth birthday. One in four women who attend a four-year college is assaulted before she finishes college. The FBI estimates that for every reported sexual assault there are approximately nine that go unreported. One in four Black women is raped after the age of 18. One in five white women is raped after the age of 18. The majority of sexual assaulters are known to the victim. The National Victim Center says that an average of 1,871 women are raped in the US each day.

Before we say that military men sexually assault women, we have to concede that men sexually assault women. According to most criminology studies, the average attacker at arrest is 31 years old. The average age of those who rape teenaged women is 22.6 years old. It is not surprising that women in the military, then, are assaulted at a slightly higher rate than women in civilian life. The average age of the military, which is now composed of approximately 85% males, is 26 years old. The majority of those troops are junior enlisted, and their average age is 19, which is also the average age of the junior enlisted female – who by her subordinate official position in the military hierarchy, her immersion in a vast male-majority, her female socialization, and her relative inexperience in the world generally, is intuited by sexual predators as victimizable.

In the first and second phases of the Gulf War, however, women troops report having been assaulted at a rate ten times higher than their civilian counterparts. This is what we have to get at before we proceed to examine the issue of the liberal state.

Christine Hansen, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, cited Madeline Morris of the Duke Law Journal:

“The norms currently prevalent within military organizations include a configuration of norms regarding masculinity, sexuality and women that have been found to be conducive to rape, including elements of hypermasculinity, adversial sexual beliefs, promiscuity, rape myth acceptance, hostility toward women and possibility the acceptance of violence against women. Morris suggested that military cohesion is associated with a culture of hypermasculinity including the objectification and denigration of women through the consumption of pornography and pervasive use of sexist language. Bonding tends to occur around stereotypic masculine characteristics, such as dominance, aggressiveness, risk taking, and attitudes that favor sexual violence toward women and that reflect distrust, anger, alienation and resentment toward women. Morris concluded that norms reflecting hypermasculinity among servicemembers are imparted during the informal acculturation process encompassing the consumption of alcohol, pornography, bragging about sexual activity and attending strip shows.”

War magnifies preconceptions of masculinity, a masculinity in which sexuality and aggression are synonyms, as it erases the boundaries that prohibit physical violence against human beings. War is carried out by an institution, the military that has a proven track record of protecting perpetrators to the extent possible and attempting to silence victims, an institution dominated by men in sheer numbers and in control over the formal command structures.

Out of almost 900 general officers in the US armed forces, only 34 are women. That is less than 4%. The percentage of women leading Fortune 500 companies, on the other hand, while still low, is around 16%. Of the 100 members of the US Senate, the most powerful political boys club in the world, 13 are women.