Why Are Women Still Treated Like Second-Class Soldiers?

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

All the men who were accused in these cases went unpunished. Several of them even won promotions.

The Defense Department claims that since 2005, it has instigated reforms that have created a "climate of confidentiality" that allows women to report without fear of being disbelieved, blamed, or punished like this. As Kaye Whitley, director of the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO), said at a press briefing at the Pentagon this past March 17, "The numbers have gone up and I reiterate, this does not mean sexual assaults have gone up, this means the number of reports have gone up, which we see as very positive as we're getting the victims in to get care."

In fact, nobody knows whether an increase in reported rapes means more rapes or more reports. And all the cases described above happened after the reforms of 2005.

Even when the military does accept a report of sexual assault, the consequences to the perpetrators tend to be negligible. Of the assaults reported and recorded by the Defense Department in the fiscal year 2008, 49 percent were dismissed as unfounded or unsubstantiated--meaning there wasn't enough proof of assault, or that the women recanted or died--and only 10.9 percent resulted in court martial.

Even those few men who are found guilty of sexual assault or rape tend to receive absurdly mild punishments, such as suspension, demotion, or a scolding letter for their file. In 2008, 62 percent of offenders found guilty received mild punishments like this. This amounts to a tiny fraction of the men accused of sexual assault. One particularly grotesque example of this sort of justice is the 2006 case of army sergeant Damon D. Shell, who ran over and killed 20-year-old Private First Class Hannah Gunterman McKinney of the 44th Corps Support Battalion on her base in Iraq on September 4. Shell pleaded guilty to drinking in a war zone, drunken driving and "consensual sodomy" with McKinney, an underage junior soldier to whom he had supplied alcohol until she was incapacitated. Having sex with a person incapacitated by alcohol is legally rape, and using rank to coerce a junior into a sexual act is legally rape in the military, too. Yet a military judge ruled McKinney's death an accident, said nothing about rape, and sentenced Shell to thirteen months in prison and demotion to private. Shell was not even kicked out of the army.

The military's retrograde attitude towards rape gets even more sinister. More female troops have died in Iraq of non-hostile causes than have been killed in battle, and several of those deaths have either been labeled suicides or been left unexplained by the military. Four of those women had earlier been raped, and at least sixteen others died in such suspicious circumstances that retired Army Colonel Ann Wright and Congressman Ike Skelton have called for Congress to compel the military to reopen the cases and investigate, so far to no avail.

One of the most shocking of these cases is that of 19-year-old LaVena Johnson, whose dead body was found on her base in Balad, Iraq in July 2005. Her father, who has pictures of her body, said her face was battered; she had been stripped, raped, burned, re-clothed, dragged across the ground bleeding and shot in the head. The Army initiated an investigation, then suddenly closed the case and labeled her death a suicide. Her father and Colonel Wright have been trying to get Congress and the Army to reopen the investigation ever since, but so far the Army has declined to cooperate.

The Defense Department has made some effort lately to improve its dismal record on military sexual assault. After a set of Congressional hearings on military sexual assault in July and September 2008, and again in January 2009, the army announced fresh programs designed to educate the troops on the prevention of sexual assault, and the hiring of more litigators to prosecute it. The other military branches, too, are revamping the sexual assault prevention classes that every new recruit must attend.

Whether these changes will make any difference is soon to be put to the test. The collapsing economy is driving numerous new recruits to the military, 16 to 29 percent of whom are women, depending on the branch of service. It remains to be seen whether these female troops will be as isolated, harassed or abused as their predecessors, or finally given the respect they deserve.

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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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