There are only three things the guys let you be
It’s a pig’s life for women in the US military.
According to several studies of the US military funded by the Department of Veteran Affairs, 30% of military women are raped while serving, 71% are sexually assaulted, and 90% are sexually harassed. The Department of Defense acknowledges the problem, estimating in its 2009 annual report on sexual assault (issued last month) that some 90% of military sexual assaults are never reported.
Well yes but don’t forget, women are privileged, the bitches.
I was the only female in my platoon of 50 to 60 men. I was also the youngest, 17. Because I was the only female, men would forget in front of me and say these terrible derogatory things about women all the time. I had to hear these things every day. I’d have to say ‘Hey!’ Then they’d look at me, all surprised, and say, ‘Oh we don’t mean you.’
Hm. I wonder if they ever referred to women as cunts. Ya think?
There are only three things the guys let you be if you’re a girl in the military – a bitch, a ho, or a dyke. You’re a bitch if you won’t sleep with them. A ho if you’ve even got one boyfriend. A dyke if they don’t like you. So you can’t win.
Oh well, those are just words, they don’t matter.
‘Why be a feminist?’ Lesson 267:
Be a father of daughters, and read stuff like this.
[Of course, I was a feminist before, but one is never short of material for strengthening the convictions…]
Yeah.
(Be a father of daughters without peculiar ideas about family ‘honour’ and read stuff like this. It’s so depressing about the other kind of fathers of daughters.)
This is just a shot in the dark, but I think it bears consideration. A number of books about war have written about the sexualisation of violence in military traditions. Rape is often used as a weapon, to be sure, but it is very often the outcome of aspects of violence that are given open expression in the context of combat. The close relationship between sex and death is fairly well understood. And the fairly open sexuality of male comaraderie in military contexts is almost legendary.
I wonder if this is something that needs to be looked at more closely. I recall Charles Taylor in A Secular Age refers to the numinous and male violence. Perhaps male violence and the sexual are even more closely related (perhaps the numinous and sexuality are closely related too), and this should be taken into account both in training (generally), as well as in the posting of female personnel.
This is not meant to excuse brutal and unacceptable conduct by male personnel, but soldiers in combat often do not exemplify the highest and best of what humanity is capable of. It strikes me that something important is being ignored here. It may be as simple as cultural attitudes towards women, but I suspect it’s got deeper roots.
Well…of course military training is about removing inhibitions against violence, for a start, so the fallout from that is never likely to be friendly to women. One hopes that the military as a whole can take that into account, and train soldiers to channel their violence, not just let it spray out all over the place. But that’s easy to say; I don’t suppose it’s easy to do.
Yet another reason not to join the military for me then… ugh.
I do wonder about the statistics though. If 90% of assaults are not reported, then those figures could be much higher, which is even more depressing. I’d be interested to see if other countries militaries have similar figures, or if the US has unuasally high figures.
Removing restraints to violence in the military is very difficult. It can be done, but its effect is fairly devastating for those who have experienced combat. That’s why there is so much more PTSD amongst soldiers returning from the front.
In WWII the percentage of American front line soldiers who actually fired their weapons was astonishingly low. Modern training techniques, which concentrate on dehumanising the enemy, have been markedly successful in getting soldiers to engage fully in combat and to use their weapons. It has however also increased the likelihood that they will treat the enemy as not quite human, so we should not be surprised if the result is morally messy. Since this training is largely based on a kind of crude male bravado, I suspect that it intensifies the large-scale dehumanisation of women that is already a significant part of popular culture.
If the modern military wants to make gender equality a real part of the modern combat unit, leaders are going to have to rewrite their training manuals. Whether doing this will provide the basis for training effective fighting troops will have to be seen.
Women shouldn’t be in the military in the first place.
“Women shouldn’t be in the military in the first place.”
Hmmm. Really? Or should that be no-one should be in the military?
Alisons shouldn’t make unargued assertions.
“Removing restraints to violence in the military is very difficult. It can be done, but its effect is fairly devastating for those who have experienced combat.”
Absolutely. The sexual violence stats could be seen as one sign of that – I would think, correctly.
“Removing restraints to violence in the military is very difficult.”
The powers that be, I think, like to keep a tight lid on violence and sexual abuse, especially of women, by their male army colleagues. Perhaps the nature of the job has a lot to do with it.
In the Gulf War the Pentagon followed the rule that if a soldier was female she must not have been in combat and therefore should not be on the receiving end of the medals dished out by the army. (Rhonda Cornum, who was a POW doctor is one such good example).
Marie-Therese, I’m not sure I made my point very well. It’s hard to get soldiers to throw off their normal civilised response to violence, and actually show eagerness to kill the enemy. In one study of US ground forces in WWII Europe, only 15% of US combat riflemen fired their rifles!! 5% of fighter pilots accounted for most of the ‘kills’. Most pilots never shot down a plane. So, while it’s possible to train men to fight, it’s not that easy to do. The US army has, since WWII, had some success at doing this, in training men (and now, presumably, women) to fight fairly brutally.
But military violence is a deeply sexualised violence, and that’s where the presence of women in combat situations, I suspect, makes for confusion. It’s not only because of how women are perceived – though they are already, in American popular culture, seriously dehumanised – but because of the very nature of organised lethal violence.
Put women into the context of the culture of military violence, and you’re bound to have problems with respect for women soldiers. It may be able to be done, but, as I say, if it is important to do it, military training will have to be revised. Until it is done, women’s role in military violence will continue to be undervalued. Whether the result will be as effective a fighting force is another question entirely.
Perhaps Alisons shouldn’t make unargued assertions, but the instinct, I think, given the facts, is right, until training and effectiveness issues are resolved.
Of course, the best resolution would be to do away with war altogether, but that’s not likely to happen soon. War is like life: rather indiscriminately cruel. That may have something to do with its popularity.
Okay, no doubt going to get my head chewed off for this but…
Does the 30% of women raped whilst in service sound credible to all of you? Taken from a news quote which provides no sources, but refers obliquely to DoD studies?
It sounds credible to me. I have no means of checking it, however.
John, Eric: It struck me as plausible but high enough to warrant caution. I’ve been trying to source the figures with mixed success.
The most likely source for the specific statistic of 71% seems to be Murdoch et al 2004. This article says ‘A 2004 study of veterans from Vietnam and all wars since, conducted by psychotherapist Maureen Murdoch and published in the journal Military Medicine, found that 71 percent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while serving.’ The 71% figure makes me think this is the source of that specific datum, but there’s a major ‘but’: the paper is Murdoch M, Polusny, MA, Hodges J, Cowper D. The association between in-service sexual harassment and posttraumatic stress disorder among compensation-seeking veterans. Military Medicine 2006;171(2):166-173. I can’t access the paper (paywalled) but the title suggests that the research was limited to individuals seeking compensation for PTSD, which means it is risky to extrapolate those figures to the military population as a whole.
That cautionary note notwithstanding, though, another paper cited in the source article I linked to above also found a roughly 30% rape rate (Sadler et al 2003, abstract here, paper here).
Some other sources find lower rates, but there’s plenty of other evidence for (varyingly) high levels too – including anecdotal evidence arising from congressional testimony such as that discussed in this article.
My conclusion: the 30% figure specifically seems to be at least somewhat robust, and even if there’s room for doubt it seems pretty clear that the rate is horrifically high.
Addendum:
I’m only partway through the Sadler paper and may not have time to finish it, but it’s worth a read – and so far it seems a very solid piece of research.
Of particular interest given our present focus on the military rape rate(which is not the paper’s main focus), the authors do cite the reasons that non-responders gave for not participating in this survey. Several reasons are given, but two stand out as being especially pertinent: 50% said that they did not consider the subject relevant to their own military experience (suggesting perhaps that those persons were likely not the victims of rape) while 29% feared it woulsd bring back bad memories (perhaps suggesting the reverse). It’s unwise of course to read too much into ‘undata’, but this perhaps suggests that the 29% figure may be a little on the high side… Maybe someone with more time (and greater numberacy) could crunch the numbers?
Sadler et al do observe that their identified rape rate is broadly consistent with (the upper bound of) prior research: ‘The rate of rape found in our research (28%) is similar
to that of other studies of women veterans reported by Hankin
et al. [1999] (23%), and Murdock and Nichol [1995] (25% of
women age 50 or younger), and Coyle et al. [1996] (29%).’
So again: 30% might be a slight overestimate, but the real rate of rape is insanely high and 30% is not in the least implausible.
I must admit, even with my prejudices about the military I’m seriously shocked.
It would be interesting to see how these figures compare to other countries’ – I would have thought it might be an especially American problem; with the anti-gay ‘Don’t’ Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy, the problems some atheist soldiers (and I imagine soldiers of other religions) have had from Christian soldiers, and now these figures on the treatment of women it does seem like the American military more than ever represents everything that right-wing evangelical conservatives want the world to perceive about the US and what they themselves want to be the dominant attitudes in American society. Forgive me if I’m not saying anything new but when you look at all these figures together it is still quite startling to realise.
Yeh I was shocked when I first heard Helen Benedict (whose book is the source of the BBC piece – that is, it’s an excerpt from her book) talk about this on ‘Fresh Air’ (public radio interview show). I had no idea it was that bad. I feel a bit stupid about having had no idea.