The military, women and sexual assault

From WND...

In the fiscal year '07, ending Oct. 1, military members serving in Iraq and Afghanistan reported 131 cases of rape and assault. The Department of Defense recorded 2,688 cases of sexual assault last year; 60 percent were allegations of rape....

According to a Government Accountability Office report released July 31, incidents of rape and sexual assault in the military are under-reported by nearly half. Many soldiers fail to report assaults because they worry "that nothing will be done; fear of ostracism, harassment, or ridicule; and concern that peers would gossip."

Some victims argue that the military chain of command would punish or move them if they complained, rather than discipline the person responsible for the assault.

A Department of Defense 2006 Gender Relations Survey of Active Duty Members shows 34 percent of all female service member respondents were sexually harassed, and 6.8 percent indicated experiencing unwanted sexual contact including rape, nonconsensual sodomy or indecent assault.

However WND doesn't tell the full story. A study at Purdue University found...

...41% (45) of the total disposed rape cases (109) were officially declared false during this 9-year period, that is, by the complainant’s admission that no rape had occurred and the charge, therefore, was false. The incidence figure was variable from year to year and ranged from a low of 27% (3 out of 11 cases) to a high of 70% (7 out of 10 cases). The 9-year period suggests no trends, and no explanation has been made for the year-to-year fluctuation....

Quite unexpectedly then, we find that these university women, when filing a rape complaint, were as likely to file a false as a valid charge.] Other reports from university police agencies support these findings (Jay, 1991). In both police agencies, the taking of the complaint and the follow-up investigation was the exclusive responsibility of a ranking female officer. Neither agency employed the polygraph and neither declared the complaint false without a recantation of the charge.

For those who don't know how to translate words into numbers, if there were as many false reports as legitimate reports, that would make the rate of false reports 50%.

Back in 2003, Donald Sensing wrote...

When I was assigned to Headquarters, US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID), I read every report of investigation that CID agents produced. There were a lot of rape accusations. Here is a very typical scenario, and if you called the Special Agent in Charge of most any Army post's CID office, you could confirm what I am writing.

Young female soldier, 18-20 years old, becomes friendly with an equally young male soldier. Their friendliness is considerably enhanced by their good friend, Al K. Hall (say it fast). They wind up in his barracks room or other private place. Neither are in full possession of their faculties. They have sexual relations.

Later - in many cases, weeks later - the female soldier accuses the male soldier of rape. There is absolutely no physical evidence of any kind. The male soldier claims the sex was totally consensual. They both admit they were drunk. There are no witnesses. A female CID agent told me that this scenario was so commonplace at her post that she and her office categorized them as "Fort Bliss rapes" to distinguish them from the real kind.

What really went on? A large number of investigative manhours are expended that lead nowhere. The trial counsel (military prosecutor) isn't about to go to trial with no evidence. The male soldier's commander, who is the only one who can actually draw up court martial charges, hears this story practically once per month, maybe more. S/He counsels, cajoles and threatens his troops about this kind of thing every week, but boys will be boys and women will be women no matter what he says. And in such cases he's not really in charge, anyway, and neither are the young men and women. General Hall, Al K., is.

I was a company commander at Fort Jackson in the early 1980s. One evening I went to the barracks to observe how well evening curfew was being obeyed (my soldiers were AIT students, one step out of basic training and one step away from the real Army). Curfew was 9 p.m. At 9:05 p.m. in straggle two female soldiers. My brigade had a strict "buddy system" and these two young women were each other's buddy for the evening.

The NCO serving as charge-of-quarters that night stops them and demands to know why they are late. Female soldier #1 immediately responds, "I would have been on time, but I was raped on the way back from the club."

The CQ turns to the other female soldier and says, "What about you?" She replies, "Oh, I was with her the whole time. We didn't break the buddy system!"

So we have to go through the whole, useless rigamarole of calling the MPs and CID and taking statements and the whole bit, because the commanding general's policy was that all rape claims would get the full treatment. Period. The soldier who said she was raped was white, so her story - naturally - went like this:

My buddy and I were walking back to the barracks from the junior-enlisted club when up the street, as we passed some large bushes, a big black man jumped out from the bushes. He grabbed me and dragged me back under the bushes, where he raped me.

No kidding, that really was her story. Her buddy that night was a black soldier; I wonder how she felt about the story. She had to confirm it because she had already said it was true, before the white soldier supplied the embellishment. (It was always a big, black guy, even if the female soldier making the claim was black herself.) Investigation shows no soil or damage to clothing, no footprints under the bushes concerned or other disturbance of the ground or mulch, and there is no DNA evidence to be found anywhere.

Another female soldier in the next company claimed she was gang-raped in the barracks and named four male soldiers as her attackers. In that case, CID was actually able to prove her story was false. My battalion commander court martialed her, as he darn well should have, and she was convicted.

In my tenure in command I had at least 80 young women claim they had been raped. All but three were false, the claims used being used as an excuse for not obeying some other instruction or in some cases as retribution against the man for some offense she took for some other reason.

Posted by Danny Carlton at August 21, 2008 9:39 AM