Rape Nation

By Kari Lydersen, AlterNet. Posted July 2, 2004.

As a new officer in the Air Force who trusted the institution and the men she worked with, Dorothy Mackey didn't think she would ever be sexually assaulted by her fellow servicemen. She was wrong.

When a military ob-gyn did things during an examination that didn't seem right, soon after she joined the service in 1983, she tried to rationalize her disturbing thoughts away. When she had another bad experience with a military ob-gyn in 1986, at the Spangcahlem Air Force base in Germany where she was stationed, it was harder to look the other way.

"He sodomized me," she said. "I started looking into what happens in a normal ob-gyn examination, and that is definitely not supposed to be part of it."

But when she was violated again about a year later, it was clear. Her group was on a training mission in Spain, passing some downtime by playing volleyball. By this time she was a sergeant, in charge of many of the enlisted men there.

"I had had a few drinks, but I know my body really well and I was not drunk," she said. She asked a male friend who was a first sergeant for a drink of water, but after two gulps of it, she realized something was very strange. She demanded to know what was in the drink, but soon she was staggering and losing her balance.

"In college everyone has had their moments, but I never experienced anything like that," she said. "I knew I had been poisoned."

She staggered inside and began violently vomiting.

"He was standing at the door laughing," she said of the supposed friend who gave her the drink.

"When I had nothing left to throw up I passed out and he took me to his room. I woke up and there were four men in the room playing cards, I remember them laughing and saying, 'Sergeant I've never seen you like this,' like they were glad I had loosened up and was enjoying myself. I passed out again and the next time I came to, he was on top of me, penetrating me. I remember telling him no and then passing out again. I woke up again to a loud knock on the door, someone who was concerned about me asking how I was doing. He was hiding behind the door naked with a full erection. I knew if I didn't do something I would be raped again."

Despite feeling like she didn't have the energy to move she pulled herself out of the room and down the hall, she said. Later when she tried to complain to her superiors about the rape, no one wanted to hear it.

Dorothy Mackey is not alone. She and other women veterans recounted their experiences at the National Summit of Women Veterans Issues in Washington, DC June 19th and 20th. As an officer, scores of women had come to Mackey and told her about abuse and rapes they had suffered, by officers, fellow enlisted men and doctors. Many of the attacks involved servicemen intentionally getting women drunk or drugging them and taking them off base.

"When you are a new woman walking onto a military base, you are like a deer and it's deer hunting season, but you don't know it," she said. "You think you can trust these people, you believe in the mission you are on together."

In 1992, Mackey quit the service, mainly because of the repeated incidences of sexual assault and domestic violence and other wrong-doing that she had seen go unpunished on the base. In 1994 she filed a civil lawsuit in a district court in Dayton, Ohio against the specific men who had assaulted her, including the superiors who abused her when she tried to report the previous assaults. The Justice Department decided to represent the defendants, so the case was moved to federal court. The Department of Justice attorney said the case should not be brought to trial on the grounds that it constituted a threat to national security, representing a "disruption of good order, morale and discipline." After making its way through the appeals courts, it ended up in front of the Supreme Court which refused to hear the case in 1998 and again in 2000.

Meanwhile Mackey founded a group called Survivors Take Action Against Abuse by Military Personnel (STAAMP) to fight the rampant rape and sexual abuse in the military and demand justice and reform. She says over 4,300 women have contacted her about being raped or assaulted while in the service, and in the vast majority of cases watching their attackers go scot-free while they are humiliated and threatened for speaking out about the attacks.

At a press conference during the National Summit of Women Veterans Issues, women cited surveys indicating that up to 50 percent of military women have experienced sexual assaults, and 78 percent have experienced sexual harassment. Because of the intimidation and harassment that women face for reporting assaults, the military's own numbers are much lower. But even so, they show a rise in assaults over the past few years. An analysis of Army records and reports published by The Washington Post on June 3 showed that reported sexual assaults increased 19 percent from 1999 to 2002, from 658 to 753, and rapes increased 25 percent, from 356 to 445.

A May 27 report from an Army task force stated that the Army "does not have a clear picture of the sexual assault issue" and lacks an "overarching policy" to deal with the problem. The report was prepared because of complaints by women's groups and lawmakers about apparently increased assaults against servicewomen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

During the National Summit, women pointed out that far from being an isolated problem, the military nurtures a culture of sexual violence and contempt for women that is linked to the rape and sexual abuse of women in occupied countries or countries where the U.S. has military bases, as well as rapes and assaults of women in U.S. prisons and jails. Rapes and sexual assaults are also often known to be high in U.S. cities and towns with military bases. On June 28, a Nashville T.V. station reported that Fort Campbell soldier Johnathan David Loynes was arrested for violently kidnapping 10- and 13-year-old girls who lived nearby and trying to force them to perform oral sex on him.

Kari Lydersen, a regular contributor to AlterNet, also writes for the Washington Post and is an instructor for the Urban Youth International Journalism Program in Chicago. She can be reached at karilyde@aol.com.

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