Helen BenedictThe Ottawa CitizenSunday, March 18, 2007
Many female soldiers say they are sexually assaulted by their male comrades and can't trust the military to protect them. 'The knife wasn't for the Iraqis,' says one woman. 'It was for the guys on my own side'As thousands of burned-out soldiers prepare to return to Iraq to fill President George Bush's unwelcome call for at least 20,000 more troops, I can't help wondering what the women among those troops will have to face. And I don't mean only the hardships of war, the killing of civilians, the bombs and mortars, the heat and sleeplessness and fear.
I mean from their own comrades -- the men.
I have talked to more than 20 female veterans of the Iraq war in the past few months, and all said the danger of rape by other soldiers is so widely recognized in Iraq that their officers routinely told them not to go to the latrines or showers without another woman for protection.
The female soldiers who were at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, for example, where U.S. troops go to demobilize, told me they were warned not to go out at night alone.
"They call Camp Arifjan 'generator city' because it's so loud with generators that even if a woman screams she can't be heard," said Abbie Pickett, 24, a specialist with the 229th Combat Support Engineering Company who spent 15 months in Iraq from 2004-05.
Mickiela Montoya, 21, who was in Iraq with the National Guard in 2005, took to carrying a knife at all times. "The knife wasn't for the Iraqis," she told me. "It was for the guys on my own side."
Comprehensive statistics on the sexual assault of female soldiers in Iraq have not been collected, but former Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered a task force in 2004 to investigate.
As a result, the Defence Department put up a website in 2005 designed to clarify that sexual assault is illegal and to help women report it. It also initiated required classes on sexual assault and harassment. The military's definition of sexual assault includes "rape; nonconsensual sodomy; unwanted inappropriate sexual contact or fondling; or attempts to commit these acts."
Unfortunately, with a greater number of women serving in Iraq than ever before, these measures are not keeping women safe. When you add in the high numbers of war-wrecked soldiers being redeployed, and the fact that the military is waiving criminal and violent records for more than one in 10 new Army recruits, the picture for women looks bleak indeed.
Last year, Col. Janis Karpinski caused a stir by publicly reporting that in 2003, three female soldiers had died of dehydration in Iraq because they refused to drink liquids late in the day.
They were afraid of being raped if they walked to the latrines after dark. The Army calls charges unsubstantiated, but Karpinski sticks by them. (Karpinski was demoted from brigadier general for her role as commander of Abu Ghraib. As the highest-ranking official to lose her job over the torture scandal, she claims she was scapegoated, and has become an outspoken critic of the military's treatment of women. In turn, the Army has accused her of sour grapes.)
"I sat right there when the doctor briefing that information said these women had died in their cots," Karpinski told me. "I also heard the deputy commander tell him not to say anything about it because that would bring attention to the problem." The latrines were far away and unlit, she explained, and male soldiers were jumping women who went to them at night, dragging them into the Port-a-Johns, and raping or abusing them. She said the deaths were reported as non-hostile fatalities.
More than 160,500 American female soldiers have served in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East since the war began in 2003, which means one in seven soldiers is a woman. Women make up 15 per cent of active duty forces, four times more than in the 1991 Gulf War. At least 450 women have been wounded in Iraq, and 71 have died. And women are fighting in combat.
Officially, the Pentagon prohibits women from serving in ground combat units such as the infantry, but mention this ban to any female soldier in Iraq and she will scoff. This is a war with no front lines or safe zones, no hiding from in-flying mortars, car and roadside bombs, and not enough soldiers. As a result, women are coming home with missing limbs, mutilating wounds and severe trauma.
Yet, despite the equal risks women are taking, they are still being treated as inferior soldiers and sex toys. As Abbie Pickett told me: "It's like sending three women to live in a frat house."
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Rape, sexual assault and harassment are nothing new to the U.S. military. They were a serious problem in Vietnam, and the rapes and sexual hounding of Navy women at Tailhook in 1991 and of Army women at Aberdeen in 1996 became international news. A 2003 U.S. survey of female veterans from Vietnam through the first Gulf War found that 30 per cent said they were raped in the military. A 2004 study of veterans from Vietnam and all the wars since, who were seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder, found that 71 per cent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while in the military. And in a study conducted in 1992-93 with female veterans of the Gulf War and earlier wars, 90 per cent said they had been sexually harassed in the military.
"That's one of the things I hated the most," said Caryle Garcia, 24, who served with the Combat Military Police in Baghdad from 2003-04. "You walk into the chow hall and there's a bunch of guys who just stop eating and stare at you. Every time you bend down, somebody will say something. It got to the point where I was afraid to walk past certain people because I didn't want to hear their comments."
Pickett, who refuelled and drove trucks over the bomb-ridden roads in Iraq, was one of 19 women in a 160-troop unit. She said the men imported cases of porn, and talked such filth at the women all the time that she became worn down. "We shouldn't have to think every day, 'How am I going to go out there and deal with being harassed?'"
Pickett herself was sexually attacked when she was training in Nicaragua before being deployed to Iraq. "I was sexually assaulted by a superior officer when I was 19, but I didn't know where to turn, so I never reported it," she told me.
Women told me the military climate is so severe on whistle-blowers that even they regarded the women who reported rape as incapable traitors. You have to handle it on your own and shut up, is how they saw it. Only on their return home, with time and distance, did they become outraged at how much sexual persecution of women goes on.
Military platoons are enclosed, hierarchical societies, riddled with gossip, so any woman who reports a rape has no realistic chance of remaining anonymous. She will have to face her assailant day after day and put up with rumours, resentment and blame from other soldiers.
She runs the risk of being punished by her assailant if he is her superior.
Even the Defence Department has been scrambling to mend the situation, at least for the public eye. It won't go so far as to gather statistics on rape and assault in Iraq (it only counts reported rapes in raw numbers for all combat areas in the Middle East combined), but in 2006 the DOD did finally wake up to the idea that anonymous reporting might help women come forward, and updated its website accordingly.
The website looks good, although some may object that it seems to pay more attention to telling women how to avoid an assault than telling men not to commit one. It defines rape, sexual assault and harassment, and makes clear they are illegal. The site explains that a soldier can report a rape anonymously to a special department, SAPR (Sexual Assault Prevention and Response), without triggering an official investigation -- a procedure called "restricted reporting." And it promises the soldier a victim's advocate and medical care.
On closer scrutiny, however, the picture is less rosy: Only active and federal duty soldiers can go to SAPR for help, which means neither inactive reservists nor veterans are eligible; soldiers are encouraged to report rapes to a chaplain, and chaplains are not trained as rape counsellors; if soldiers tell a friend about an assault, that friend is legally obliged to report it to officials; soldiers must disclose their rank, gender, age, race, service and the date, time and/or location of the assault, which in the closed world of a military unit hardly amounts to anonymity; and, in practice, since most people in the Army are men, the soldier will likely find herself reporting her sexual assault to a man -- something rape counsellors know does not work. Worse, no measures will be taken against the accused assailant unless the victim agrees to stop being anonymous.
The DOD insists on the success of its reforms, the proof being that the number of reported military sexual assaults rose by 1,700 from 2004 to a total of 2,374 in 2005. "The success of the SAPR program is in direct correlation with the increased numbers of reported sexual assaults," Cynthia Smith, a Defence Department spokeswoman, wrote to me in an e-mail.
In fact, as anyone familiar with sexual assault statistics knows, nobody can ever tell whether increases in rape rates are due to more reporting or more rapes.
My own interviewees and advocates on behalf of women veterans say there is a huge gap between what the military promises to do on its website and what it does in practice.
"Are soldiers who report sexual assaults in the military still seen as betraying their comrades?" I asked Smith.
"Our soldiers are being fully trained that sexual assault is the most under-reported crime," she wrote in reply. "In that training, not reporting a sexual assault is the betrayal to their comrades."
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Back in real life, Pickett watched several of her friends try to report sexual harassment and assault since the 2005 reforms. "These women are turning perpetrators in and they're not getting anyone to speak on their behalf," she told me. In the end, she added, it boils down to the woman's word versus the man's, and he is the one with the advocate.
I am not claiming that sexual persecution is universal in the military, or that it is inevitable.
Several soldiers I interviewed told me that if a commander won't tolerate the mistreatment of women, it will not happen, and studies back this up. Jennifer Hogg, 25, who was a sergeant in the Army's National Guard, said her company treated her well because she had a commander who wouldn't permit the mistreatment of women.
While commanders of some units are apparently less vigilant about policing rape, others engage in it themselves, a phenomenon known in the military as "command rape." Because the military is hierarchical, and because soldiers are trained to obey and never question their superiors, men of rank can assault their juniors with impunity. In most cases, women soldiers are the juniors, 18 to 20 years old, and are new to the military and war, thus vulnerable to bullying and exploitation.
Callie Wight, a psychosocial counsellor in women veterans' health in Los Angeles, has been treating women who were sexually assaulted in the military for the past 11 years. She told me she has only seen a handful of cases where a woman reported an assault to her commander with any success in getting the assailant punished. "Most commanders dismiss it," she said. A nine-month study of military rape by the Denver Post in 2003 found that nearly 5,000 accused military sex offenders had avoided prosecution since 1992.
The real attitude in the military is this: If you tell, you are going to get punished. The assailant, meanwhile, will go free.
Which brings up an issue that lies at the core of every soldier's heart: comradeship.
It is for their comrades that soldiers enlist and re-enlist. It is for their "battle buddies" that they risk their lives and put up with all the miseries of sandstorms, polluted water, lack of sanitation and danger. Soldiers go back to Iraq, even if they've turned against the war, so as not to let their buddies down. Comradeship is what gets men through war, and is what has always got men through war. You protect your battle buddy, and your battle buddy protects you.
As an Iraq veteran put it to me: "There's nobody you love like you love a person who's willing to take a bullet for you."
So how does this work for women? A few find buddies among the other women, but for most there are no other women, so their battle buddies are men. Some of these men are trustworthy. Many are not.
How can a man who pressures you for sex every day, who treats you like a prostitute, who threatens or punishes you if you refuse him, or who actually attacks you, be counted on to watch your back in battle?
"Battle buddy bullshit," said Garcia from the military police. "I saw so many girls get screwed over, the sexual harassment. I didn't trust anybody and I still don't."
If this is a result of the way women are treated in the military, where does it leave them when it comes to battle camaraderie? I asked soldier after soldier this, and they all gave me the same answer:
Alone.
Helen Benedict writes for Salon where a longer version of this article first appeared.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007
