Prosecution should be automatic in cases of sexual assault, harassment in the military
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Armies can disgrace and dishonor themselves by their conduct toward enemies and civilians. The troops’ behavior toward each other can also disgrace and dishonor them, even more so when the institution permits that misconduct. When parents give their children to the military, they send boys and girls whom they expect to return as men and women. They dread their wounds and their deaths, but they do not expect them to return raped by their comrades, or rapists of their comrades, or coarsened by commanders who protect rapists and punish their victims. As morally and physically dangerous as military service is, we Americans know it is also an honorable calling. That honorable calling has been racked by one sexual “scandal” after another. Tailhook was a drunken party that more than got out of hand and some instructors systematically preyed upon students at the U.S. Army Ordnance Center and School at Aberdeen Proving Grounds. A Department of Defense inspector general survey found that 18.8 percent of women cadets had been sexually assaulted at least once while at the Air Force Academy; 7.4 percent of all respondents, including 11.7 percent of the class of 2003, had been raped or had suffered attempted rape. This is nothing short of the political use of rape to drive women out of the Air Force Academy, that service’s most prestigious source of commissions. A recent Department of Veterans Affairs survey found that one-third of female service members deployed during Desert Storm and Desert Shield suffered physical sexual harassment, and 13 of 160 respondents reported sexual assault, 10 times the civilian rate during that period. Another VA survey found 30 percent of female veterans have been victims of rape or attempted rape during active duty. In 2003, The Denver Post published “Betrayal in the Ranks,” a searing investigation into the military’s institutional reluctance to punish sexual assaults against servicewomen and military wives, including rape to which the perpetrator had confessed, gang rape, murder and attempted murder. The attitude of the Department of Defense toward that investigation, which has been updated with further articles, was that there was and is no problem. More : seattlepi.nwsource.com |