Why Are Women Still Treated Like Second-Class Soldiers?

By Helen Benedict, The Nation. Posted May 25, 2009.

These arguments have been made for decades by conservatives too, but ironically a 2005 Gallup Poll, reported by the military itself, belies them: 72 percent of the public favored women serving anywhere in Iraq, and 44 percent (and here I quote the military's own report) "favored having women serve as the ground troops who are doing most of the fighting."

Not one of these arguments against women in combat has been borne out in Iraq. Any sign of public or media outrage over how many women soldiers are being killed and wounded in Iraq has been conspicuously absent; rather, the press has focused the bulk of its war stories on men, as if female soldiers barely exist, and the same applies to feature films and documentaries. Far from protecting women, many men are attacking them, as discussed below. Studies have long shown that some women's strength matches that of some men, and that women use ingenuity instead of strength where necessary. And there is no evidence that women soldiers add to the danger of men in any way. On the contrary, it is women who are in more danger than before, both from being in battle and from those very men who are supposed to feel so protective of them.

The fact is that military women want equality, and even though not all will choose to join a ground combat unit, just as not all men do, they want the choice to be theirs, not the government's. "War doesn't give a damn what your job is, we're getting killed anyway," said Miriam Barton, an army sergeant from Oregon who served in Iraq from 2003-2004 as a heavy gunner with an engineering unit. "We're getting blown up right alongside the guys. We're manning whatever weapons we can get our little hands on. We're in combat! So there's no reason to keep us segregated anymore."

The majority of military men do not look down on women as inferior soldiers or sex objects, of course, but there are still too many who do. "A lot of the men didn't want us there," Montoya said about her time in Iraq. "One guy told me the military sends women soldiers over to give the guys eye-candy to keep them sane. He told me in Vietnam they had prostitutes, but they don't have those in Iraq, so they have women soldiers instead."

Some soldiers and commanders show their hostility by undermining women's authority, denying them promotions, or denigrating their work. Others show it through sexual harassment, assault, and and rape (of which there is a shockingly high rate in the military). These problems occur throughout the military, on US bases all over the world, as well as at war.

In 2003, a survey of female veterans found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military. A 2004 study of veterans who were seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder found that 71 percent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while serving. And a 1995 study of female veterans of the Gulf and earlier wars, found that 90 percent had been sexually harassed.

The Defense Department shows much lower numbers, but that is because it only counts reported rapes--and, as the DoD admits itself in this year's annual Pentagon report on military sexual assault, some 90 percent of rapes in the military are ever reported at all. Nonetheless, that same report showed that in 2008, reports of assault increased by 8 percent military-wide, and by 26 percent in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. For many women soldiers, the result of all this persecution is that instead of finding camaraderie among their fellow soldiers, or being able to rely on comrades to watch their backs in battle, they feel dangerously alone. As specialist Carlye Garcia, who was sexually harassed throughout her service with the Army Military Police in Baghdad from 2003-04, put it, "It got so I didn't trust anybody in my company after a few months. I didn't trust anybody at all. I still don't." The hostility and rejection can run right up through the ranks, too, as women commonly find when they try to report an assault. Some examples: when Lieutenant Jennifer Dyer refused to return to post with an officer she had reported for raping her, the army threatened to prosecute her for desertion.

When Specialist Suzanne Swift reported her sergeant for repeatedly raping her over months and then refused to redeploy under him, the army tried her by court martial for desertion and put her in prison for a month.

When Cassandra Hernandez of the Air Force reported being gang-raped by three comrades at her training acadamy, her command charged her with indecent behavior for consorting with her rapists.

When Sergeant Marti Ribeiro reported being raped by a fellow serviceman while she was on guard duty in Afghanistan, the Air Force threatened to court martial her for leaving her weapon behind during the attack. "That would have ruined by career," she said. "So I shut up."

See more stories tagged with: women, military, sexual harrassment, harrassment, female veterans

n Benedict, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq. (Beacon Press). Her articles on female soldiers won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism in 2008.

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