At War With Ourselves: Battling Sexual Violence in the Military

The prevalence of sexual violence against American women fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is a national shame.

U.S. servicewomen today are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. At some Veterans Affairs hospitals, over 40 percent of female patients report having been sexually assaulted during their service, and almost one-third are survivors of rape.

Here in the States, a 2006 investigation by the Associated Press found that more than 100 high school-aged women were sexually assaulted or raped by male military recruiters. "Women were raped on recruiting office couches, assaulted in government cars and groped en route to entrance exams," the AP reported. Many recruiters found guilty of sexually assaulting women faced only administrative punishments, while a recruiter who molested teenage boys was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

These horrific statistics don't even take into account the experiences of American women working for government contractors in Iraq. A recent Nation magazine investigation by reporter Karen Houppert told the story of Lisa Smith (a pseudonym), who was gang-raped in Iraq this past January while working for Kellogg Brown & Root, the former Halliburton subsidiary. Houppert writes:

That dawn, naked, covered in blood and feces, bleeding from her anus, [Smith] found a US soldier she did not know lying naked in the bed next to her: his gun lay on the floor beside the bed, she could not rouse him and all she could remember of the night before was screaming and screaming as the soldier anally penetrated her while a colleague who worked for defense contractor KBR held her hand -- but instead of helping her, as she had hoped, he jammed his penis in her mouth.

Over the next few weeks Smith would be told to keep quiet about the incident by a KBR supervisor. The camp's military liaison officer also told her not to speak about what had happened, she says.

This brutal crime -- and KBR's subsequent cover-up -- are far from isolated events. Jamie Leigh Jones, who alleges that employees of KBR/Halliburton gang-raped her in Iraq in 2005, founded a non-profit to advocate for women who were assaulted while working as military contractors abroad. Jones' group is working with 40 victims. And a single Texas law firm is representing 15 women with sexual harassment, assault, rape, or retaliation (for reporting a sexual assault) claims against Halliburton and its affiliates.

Some will look at the breadth of the U.S. military's sexual assault problem and conclude that women should not be serving in combat zones. But that ignores the real and impressive achievements of female soldiers, who've stepped up as never before during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in large part due to the growing obsolescence of the military's ban on women serving at the "front lines." Last month, Monica Lin Brown, an Army medic from Texas, became only the second woman since World War II to receive a Silver Star. During a roadside bombing attack, Brown saved the lives of wounded soldiers, running through insurgent gunfire to shield them from attack.

So how can we respect women's military service while simultaneously helping them fight a culture that puts them at serious risk of sexual harassment, assault, and rape? Here are some practical policy solutions:

1. Increase the DOD's rate of prosecution of sexual harassment, assault, and rape claims. As Congresswoman Jane Harman wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed last week, outside of the military, 44 percent of reported rapes result in an arrest, and 64 percent of those arrests result in a trial. But inside the military, only about eight percent of reported sexual assaults and rapes lead to a court martial. Under pressure, the Department of Defense reluctantly agreed last year to create a Sexual Assault and Response Office. It must be held accountable and given wide latitude to create training programs that change the military's sexual culture. And every sexual assault victim who comes forward should be given an advocate to represent him or her through the process to a court martial.